Using Freedom of Information

What is Freedom of Information?

The Freedom of Information Act is a law. It gives you the right to ask authorities for information.

In most cases, if the authority has the information you ask for, they must provide it.

The FOI Act covers many government or public authorities, including all councils and some housing associations. You can check here to see if your landlord is one of them.

How can I use FOI?

As a tower block tenant, you might find FOI useful when you’ve been unsuccessful in getting answers any other way.

Perhaps you’ve written to your landlord but had no reply, or received a reply that didn’t really answer your question.

Using FOI, you can ask for information, documents or data. That could include things like fire safety assessments, correspondence, contracts, statistics, etc.

You might use these to find out things like:

What materials were used in the construction of my tower block?
When was the last fire safety assessment carried out?
Have there been any reports into the safety of my tower block in the past?

You can only ask for information or data that the authority already holds, and you can’t ask for personal information (if you want to do that, you’ll need to submit a Subject Access Request).

How can I make an FOI request?

There is a website called WhatDoTheyKnow which makes it very easy.

Vi sit WhatDoTheyKnow now.

You can read more about how to use it on their Help page.

When you make an FOI request on WhatDoTheyKnow, the request and the answer is published online, so that other people can find the information in the future. This can be helpful for other people living in your block, or living in blocks with similar issues.

In fact, before you make your request, it might be worth searching WhatDoTheyKnow to see if anyone else has already asked your question. That would save you the time and effort.