The Refusal Before the Reading: How Section 14 Is Quietly Narrowing FOI in 2026

Section 14 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is short, permissive and increasingly load-bearing. It allows a public authority to refuse a request as vexatious. The exemption is not a judgment about whether a request is rude, politically inconvenient or unlikely to produce a smoking gun. In guidance, the Information Commissioner's Office frames it around the effect of the request: whether complying would impose a disproportionate burden, or whether the request is part of a campaign of harassment. The difficulty is that the label is often applied at the point of triage, before anyone has read a page.

The Ferret reviewed 2,316 FOI refusal notices issued by 104 councils, 19 central government departments and 22 quangos between January and September 2026. Section 14 was cited, alone or alongside other exemptions, in 11.2% of refusals. The rate was highest in councils, at 13.6%, compared with 7.4% in departments and 9.1% in quangos. Only 41% of section 14 notices included any estimate of the staff time or cost involved. The median time from receipt to refusal was three working days. In 62% of cases, no documents were released.

What Gets Tagged

Requests about a single long-running issue dominated the sample: school transport, planning enforcement, temporary accommodation, a named official, a disputed contract. Repeat requests made up 44% of section 14 refusals; broad requests 31%; requests for internal correspondence 19%; other categories 6%. By requester type, residents accounted for 49%, campaign groups 24%, journalists 12%, businesses 9% and elected members 6%.

The label often follows a person rather than a request. In 28% of section 14 refusals, the notice referred to previous requests by the same requester. That matters because section 14 is meant to address the effect of a request, not to create a permanent category of inconvenient correspondent. A requester who has been labelled once may find later, narrower requests refused on the same basis.

How the Burden Argument Is Made

The law does not define vexatious. The commissioner's guidance says a public authority must show that a request is manifestly unreasonable. That is a high bar. It is not enough that a request is burdensome, or that answering it would require effort. The authority should explain why the burden is disproportionate and why narrowing the request would not resolve it.

In practice, the quality of that explanation varies. Some notices in the sample were detailed: one council estimated 68 officer hours to review 1,400 emails and set out why a date limit would not reduce the volume. Others were circular. One notice said the request would create a reasonable burden without saying what the burden was. Another refused a request for a single contract because the requester had made previous requests on the same subject, even though the earlier requests covered different years.

The burden test is also being argued through delay. A section 14 refusal can arrive before an authority has searched its records, which means the requester cannot test the claim. Internal review may take months. The commissioner's casework backlog adds more time. By the point a complaint is determined, the news cycle has moved on, the contract has been awarded or the service has closed.

What Happens to Scrutiny

When section 14 is used early, the public record does not shrink by one document. It loses the paper trail that would allow anyone to test the claim. A refusal notice is not a dataset. It is an assertion. The effect is cumulative: fewer documents, fewer appeals, less institutional learning. For journalists, the label can arrive before a single email is read. For campaigners, it can close a route to evidence. For residents, it can turn a legitimate concern into a file note.

That does not mean every section 14 refusal is wrong. Some requests are genuinely obsessive, repetitive or designed to exhaust. Public authorities need a route to close them. The question is whether the route is being used as a first response rather than a last resort, and whether the public can see the reasoning. The current system asks requesters to trust a burden estimate they cannot inspect, in a process they cannot observe, about documents they will never see.

A Narrower Door

There are practical fixes. Authorities could publish section 14 logs in machine-readable form, with the requester type, subject, burden estimate and review outcome. They could separate the vexatious requester from the vexatious request, so that a narrow request is not refused because of an earlier dispute. They could narrow rather than refuse where the burden can be reduced. The commissioner could publish more data on section 14 complaints and outcomes.

None of these fixes would remove the exemption. They would make it legible. The Ferret's review suggests that is the missing ingredient. Section 14 is not closing the door because the cupboard is empty. It is closing the door before anyone has looked.