The First-tier Tribunal has dismissed an appeal by a requester who argued the Information Commissioner did not go far enough in a decision notice finding that Humberside Police had "unreasonably restricted the scope" of a freedom of information request about the recording of 101 calls.
In Mark Armstrong v The Information Commissioner [2026] UKFTT 1011 (GRC), Mr Armstrong asked Humberside Police in November 2024 for "all information" held on the tape recording of 101 calls from members of the public, clarifying that this should include the legislation permitting the practice, information on retention and deletion, the force's own policies and procedures, and confirmation or denial that all incoming 101 calls are recorded.
The force refused the first three parts under section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, on the basis that the information was reasonably accessible by other means, and confirmed that 101 calls are recorded. During the Commissioner's investigation it issued a revised response maintaining section 21 for the first two parts and stating that no separate local policies or procedures were held.
Section 21 of FOIA exempts information that is reasonably accessible to the applicant by other means, while section 1(1)(a) obliges public authorities to confirm or deny whether requested information is held, a question determined on the balance of probabilities by reference to the adequacy of the authority's searches.
The Commissioner upheld the section 21 response for the legislative basis of call recording but found that the retention and deletion material relied on by the force was not in fact reasonably accessible, pointing to defective links and material that was unavailable or insufficiently identified.
More significantly, he found the force had treated the four categories set out by Mr Armstrong as exhaustive rather than illustrative, artificially narrowing a request expressly framed as one for "all information". Searches conducted on that basis could not establish what was held, and the Commissioner found a breach of section 1(1)(a), ordering fresh searches across the full scope of the request and a new response to the retention and deletion element without reliance on section 21.
On appeal, Mr Armstrong argued that section 21 could not apply to the legislative basis because the force had supplied a defective link and its privacy notice identified no specific statutory authority for recording calls. He also contended that the remedy was inadequate, that the Commissioner had failed to scrutinise the force's narrow keyword searches, and, in a reply to the Commissioner's response, that reliance on a "closed file" breached his right to a fair hearing under Article 6 ECHR.
The tribunal panel chaired by Judge Cragg KC, sitting with tribunal members Anne Chafer and Suzanne Cosgrave, upheld the Commissioner's decision notice of 29 October 2025 (IC-355066-V8Q0) in full, and confirmed that no closed material had played any part in the proceedings.
The tribunal disposed of the Article 6 point briefly, recording that no application for closed material had been made or granted, that no closed file had been considered, and that the appeal was determined entirely on open material available to all parties.
On section 21, the panel rejected the premise that a discrete statutory power directed specifically at recording 101 calls must exist. Call recording, it held, is an operational aspect of the discharge of statutory policing functions and forms part of the processing of personal data for law enforcement purposes. Where the legal basis is distributed across a framework of statutes and principles governing policing and data processing, a response pointing to that publicly available framework is sufficient. The defective link was a matter of concern at the level of good administrative practice, the tribunal said, but section 21 asks whether information is reasonably accessible in substance, not whether the authority provided a flawless signpost at the first attempt.
The panel was equally unpersuaded that the Commissioner should have prescribed the further searches in detail. The statutory scheme does not require the Commissioner "to supervise the minutiae of the authority's internal search processes", the tribunal said, and FOIA contemplates an iterative process in which a deficient fresh response can be challenged through the same mechanisms.
Because the tribunal upheld the decision notice, it noted that it had no power to grant Mr Armstrong's alternative request for a binding order specifying the nature and extent of the searches Humberside Police must undertake. The appeal was dismissed.
