The First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber) has dismissed an appeal by a Wokingham Borough Council resident who sought access to correspondence between the Council and its property valuers relating to a series of disclaimed audit opinions.
In Meadowcroft v Information Commissioner [2026] UKFTT 647 (GRC), Judge Sophie Buckley, sitting with Members Miriam Scott and Susan Wolf, upheld the Commissioner's decision that the Council was entitled to refuse the request under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on the grounds that it was vexatious.
Philip Meadowcroft had requested all correspondence between Wokingham Borough Council and property valuers Carter Jonas over a 25-month period concerning the valuation of Council assets. His interest was prompted by the Council receiving disclaimed audit opinions from Ernst & Young for three consecutive financial years — 2021/22, 2022/23, and 2023/24. A 'disclaimed' audit is the most serious opinion an auditor can issue, indicating an inability to form any view on whether the financial statements were accurate or reliable.
Mr Meadowcroft believed that a fundamental disagreement between the Council and Carter Jonas over the valuation of a large property portfolio, funded by two tranches of £100 million, had contributed significantly to the disclaimed audits.
The Council initially refused the request on confidentiality and other grounds, before switching at internal review to a section 14 refusal. It estimated that complying with the request would require in excess of 460 hours of officer time, based on a search of its Microsoft Purview system for all emails to or from the Carter Jonas domain, which returned 5,528 results.
The Information Commissioner upheld the refusal, reducing the burden estimate but concluding it remained well in excess of the section 12 appropriate limit. He also found that the value of disclosure was insufficient to outweigh that burden, noting the disclaimed audits were a widespread national problem affecting local authorities across England and that the Council had directed Mr Meadowcroft to publicly available audit committee reports.
The Tribunal agreed that the burden of compliance was extremely significant, though it was critical of the Council's search methodology. The panel found that a more targeted keyword search, for example, combining the Carter Jonas domain search with terms such as "valuation" or "assets", would have returned considerably fewer results than the 5,528 emails identified.
Adopting a more conservative approach, the Tribunal estimated that a focused search would have produced around 1,500 emails. Even on that basis, after applying the Council's own estimates for relevance-filtering and substantive review, compliance would still have required more than 41 hours of officer time - over three times the section 12 appropriate limit - rising to over five times that limit when redaction time was included.
On the question of value, the Tribunal was not persuaded that disclosure of the correspondence would add meaningfully to public understanding. It found that the publicly available Ernst & Young audit updates already provided detailed explanations of why the audits had been disclaimed, addressing both the national context of the local audit backlog and the specific issues around outstanding valuation evidence at Wokingham.
At the hearing, Mr Meadowcroft acknowledged that he had wanted to "go on a fishing expedition" and had not considered narrowing the scope of his request, for example, to correspondence relating to assets above a specified value threshold, because he was concerned about missing material. When pressed by the panel on what the correspondence would add to transparency beyond existing public documents, he was unable to give a clear answer.
The Tribunal noted that Mr Meadowcroft had conducted himself courteously and with no improper motive throughout. It emphasised that section 14 addresses the vexatiousness of the request, not the character of the requester.
Dismissing the appeal, the Tribunal concluded that the request, viewed holistically, represented a manifestly disproportionate and unjustified use of FOIA, and that the Council had been entitled to rely on section 14(1).
