The First-tier Tribunal has overturned an Information Commissioner's finding that the Department for Work and Pensions held no further information about how claimants were selected for Universal Credit managed migration, but ruled that the requester will receive nothing more because the cost of extracting the material would exceed the limit under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 despite neither the department nor the Commissioner had relied on this exemption.
In Lotz v The Information Commissioner and the Department for Work and Pensions [2026] UKFTT 1014 (GRC), a panel comprising Judge Marks CBE and members Saunders and Wolf allowed the appeal and issued a substitute decision notice recording that the DWP holds information within the scope of the request but is not obliged to comply with it, and need take no further steps.
Mr Lotz asked the DWP in October 2024 for the mechanism or formula by which the Secretary of State identified and decided who would be issued a Universal Credit migration notice, and when, asking for the exact criteria, who decided on them, "or is it just random?" Managed migration, the process by which claimants on legacy benefits who had not moved to Universal Credit naturally or voluntarily were required to do so, was completed in December 2025.
The department initially relied on section 21 of FOIA, directing the requester to published material. The Commissioner rejected that position during his investigation, and in March 2025 the DWP provided further information, including material obtained from HMRC on the processes used to select claimants. Mr Lotz maintained the material addressed timeframes for contacting groups of claimants rather than the mechanism determining the order in which individuals were selected, and told the Commissioner he believed it to be misleading, prompting the response that FOIA confers a right to information as it is held, regardless of whether it is correct. The Commissioner's decision notice of 23 May 2025 concluded on the balance of probabilities that no further information was held.
Section 12 of FOIA permits a public authority to refuse a request where it estimates the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit, set for central government at £600 by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and calculated at £25 per hour, giving a maximum of 24 hours' work.
Neither the Commissioner nor the DWP attended the in-person hearing at Field House in April 2026, and at Mr Lotz's invitation the tribunal adjourned and issued case management directions requiring the department to answer questions about whether recorded information existed on the computer code and algorithm used to create the file of claimants in scope to move to Universal Credit, who created it, the brief they were given, and the criteria and sequencing for the weekly selection of claimants.
Three DWP teams - the Data Enablement Team, responsible for the code producing the list of in-scope claimants; the Move to UC Programme Team, responsible for defining the criteria for selection, deferral and exclusion; and the Working Age Services Dependent Systems Team, responsible for the secure transfer of data in and out of the Universal Credit system - each held numerous potentially relevant documents across several internal systems.
More than 100 tickets on the department's JIRA work management tool were linked to the information sought. The department had already spent around 26.5 hours identifying, locating and reviewing material to answer the tribunal's questions, and estimated a further 70 hours to identify and extract the Data Enablement code, transform it into a usable format and comply with security requirements.
On that evidence the tribunal found, contrary to the decision notice, that the DWP did hold further information within the scope of the request. But it also found the information could not straightforwardly be extracted or compiled from existing records, did not exist in usable format and would have to be created, exceeding the department's obligations under FOIA. The time already spent on searches was at or beyond the appropriate limit, and even a fraction of the department's estimated further hours would take the total cost over it.
The tribunal held that the Commissioner erred in law in not considering the possible application of section 12, allowed the appeal and substituted a decision notice applying the exemption. No further action is required of the department.
