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A disclaimer of opinion means an auditor cannot say whether a council's accounts are accurate. The Ferret's tracker identifies 17 English councils with disclaimers on their latest published accounts, with some audits years behind.
A review of 500 councillor declarations across UK local authorities finds registers published in incompatible formats, updated at wildly different speeds, and often missing the basic indexing that would let residents spot a conflict. The system is meant to be a first warning, but in many town halls it behaves like a filing cabinet with no lock and no index.
Cross-referencing the 2026 ministerial meetings register against lobbying disclosures and released diaries shows that access rarely looks like a scandal. It looks like a pattern: the same kinds of organisations, the same quarters, the same omissions. We set out ten encounters that illustrate how the system works.
Twenty working days is the legal limit for answering a freedom of information request. In practice, a cluster of departments, councils and quangos routinely take far longer — and the pattern of delay is not random. The Ferret examines the logs, the appeals and what lies behind the hold-ups.