A First-tier Tribunal has dismissed an appeal against Westminster City Council's refusal to answer a Freedom of Information request over an emergency response delay caused in part by inaccurate address data that the Council had submitted to Ordnance Survey more than two decades earlier.
In April 2015, the appellant's father collapsed with a cardiac arrest at a housing estate in the borough. Emergency responders were unable to locate the address. As the Tribunal recorded, the delay proved fatal.
It was not until 2019 that the appellant, having obtained copies of the mapping used by the London Ambulance Service, established that the geographical coordinates in that mapping did not enable emergency responders to find the property. He complained to the Council, which took no action.
In March 2021, following his sustained efforts, Ordnance Survey corrected the mapping errors, but only in relation to the immediate vicinity of the appellant's property. The wider area remained incorrectly mapped. The Council also adjusted the BLPU coordinate point for the appellant's address.
The appellant established that Google Maps - which draws on OS data - continued to reflect the original errors submitted by the Council in 1999/2000. He brought this to the Council's attention in April 2023. The FOI request, made in January 2024, asked the Council what action had it taken to seek correction of the mapping?
In or around 1999 and 2000, Westminster City Council submitted address data to Ordnance Survey through its role as the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) custodian for the borough. That data, which concerned the reordering of addresses at a Westminster social housing estate, was inaccurate. Ordnance Survey used it to produce maps with incorrect address annotations and, in March 2001, the Council used the same mapping to assign a Unique Property Reference Number and geographical coordinates to the appellant's property.
The LLPG is the address database local authorities are responsible for creating and maintaining, containing all addresses within their area to a national standard. The addresses in the LLPG feed into the National Address Gazetteer, which is the address database used by emergency services and other government agencies to help deliver services to properties.
The Council refused the January 2024 FOI request under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on the grounds that the request was vexatious. It pointed to previous 22 FOI and EIR requests submitted in the 15 months since October 2022, nine relating to the appellant's address, four specifically to the naming and numbering of the address around 2000, and extensive associated correspondence that had required the designation of a dedicated lawyer as a single point of contact and the initiation of mediation. The ICO upheld the refusal in a Decision Notice dated 16 October 2024.
The Tribunal ordered substantial further disclosure from both the Council and the ICO before proceeding to determine the appeal, including copies of all 22 requests, the Stage 1 and 2 complaints correspondence, the Local Government Ombudsman decision, and the mediation outcome statement. It also directed submissions on whether the request constituted a request for environmental information under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, a point that had not been fully addressed.
The Tribunal concluded that the information requested was not environmental information for EIR purposes. The Council's activity of maintaining address mapping data, and the question of what action it had taken in relation to third-party mapping held by OS and Google, did not fall within the regulation 2(1) EIR definition of environmental information. Even if the underlying mapping activity could be brought within the definition, the requested information - the Council's own response actions - was not itself an activity meeting any of the EIR categories. The request fell to be dealt with under FOIA.
The vexatious finding
Applying the Dransfield framework — burden, motive, value or serious purpose, and harassment or distress — the Tribunal unanimously found the request vexatious, characterising the case as one of vexatiousness by drift, following Oxford Phoenix v Information Commissioner [2018] UKUT 192 (AAC).
On burden, the Tribunal accepted that the specific request was not inherently resource-intensive to answer. But section 14(1) assessments may take into account the full course of previous dealings. The accumulated burden of the appellant's preceding requests, which had generated immediate follow-up requests pending internal reviews, requests for clarification of responses, cross-referencing between departments, and a pattern of using each response as the basis for the next request, had imposed very significant demands on the Council.
The Tribunal also noted the appellant's wider use of FOIA beyond the mapping subject matter, including requests about highway maintenance, planning permissions, building materials, and Council operations, which cumulatively had required the Council to respond month after month across numerous service areas.
On motive, the Tribunal was careful to acknowledge the appellant's sincerity. The concerns underlying the request were plainly genuine and the tragedy at their root was not in question. But the Council had told the appellant repeatedly, across Stage 1 and 2 complaints, Ombudsman proceedings and mediation, that it was not responsible for the accuracy of data held by third parties such as OS. Nothing in the evidence demonstrated otherwise. What had perhaps begun as a reasonable civic inquiry had taken on the character of a campaign to harry the Council through FOIA on a point the Council had consistently addressed.
On value, the Tribunal accepted in principle that accountability for health and safety data failures was a legitimate FOIA concern. But the precise terms of the request - asking what action the Council had taken to correct Google Maps - could not, however answered, directly remedy the mapping errors or produce any material outcome for the other residents the appellant identified as affected.
On harassment and distress, the Tribunal found this factor engaged only to a low degree given that the request was itself inoffensively framed, though the targeting of a single LLPG Custodian officer across multiple requests over years was noted.
The Tribunal said: "We conclude that [the request] is manifestly unreasonable and unjustified... [It] bears all the hallmarks of vexatiousness by drift. What may have started out as a line of enquiry stimulated by a genuine concern, appears, by the time of the Request, to have metamorphosed into a pursuit so unreasonable and so disproportionate as to have lost any initial value or serious purpose it may have had."
The decision in Marshall v Information Commissioner and Westminster City Council [2026] UKFTT 00889 (GRC), issued by Judge Foss, Tribunal Members Chafer and Cosgrave on 12 June 2026 can be found at https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukftt/grc/2026/889?court=uksc&court=ewca%2Fciv&court=ewhc%2Fadmin&tribunal=ukiptrib&tribunal=ukftt%2Fgrc.
