Anyone know about FOI requests?

[BelleHend]

Let's say I wanted to find out if an employee of a public organisation had been investigated for, say, sexual misconduct, could I ask for that I for that information?

No not likely, that is personal data about a person. You can ask things like "how many people have been investigated for sexual misconduct".

FOIs are for crap like 'how much money did Home Office spend on staff Christmas parties in 2024' or 'how much aid did we send to Syria in 2024 and hat proportion of that went into Assad's pocket' or 'How much money was spent on providing field for Keir Starmer's Private Jet in the first six months of his tenure as PM.'

Not personal data.

Even if you asked a more generic question, they don't have to answer even if you ask something completely mundane - there's lots of exemptions (Personal Data/National Security/Time/Resource etc).

FWIW I'm assuming you're asking because you want to investigate someone or use the evidence in court or similar. Which would also fall under an exemption: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/exemptions/list-of-exemptions/

You can ask whatever you want, but they will not tell you something like that!

No I don't want to use it in court. I'm sorry they I'm being vague.

If I can ask "How many people were investigated for sexual misconduct", can I ask "How many people were investigated for sexual misconduct from Department X?"

Thank you for all your help.

Have a look through the list of successful and unsuccessful requests on here
to see what you might get same answers to
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

They won’t give you detail where it could be identifying. So you’d need more than 10 (usually) people in Department X to have been investigated in the time frame for them to tell you.

This - if it's small numbers then they will just decline on the basis that if they supplied the information it could be personally identifiable.

You can ask that but if e.g the answer was 1, they may refuse to answer as that could be enough to identify the person using other data sources.

E.g during covid, if only one person in a town had covid, they used to put 'between 1 and 5' on the covid map.

No as that's personal data.

Thank you so much for all your help.