ICO Complaint Builder — Escalate an FOI Refusal Under Section 50
The ICO decides FOI complaints on the paperwork, and a complaint that arrives without the correspondence trail simply generates a request for it. Assembling the chronology and the enclosures first is most of the work.
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ICO Complaint Builder
Generate a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after an internal review fails to resolve your FOI dispute. The ICO normally expects you to complete an internal review first, but section 50(2)(a) makes that its discretion rather than a bar — if the authority never responded, or is not conducting the review, say so. Ordinarily the ICO will investigate. Fill in the details, tick the documents you are enclosing, then copy or print.
Evidence checklist — tick documents you have ready to enclose
How it works
- Six inputs plus a checklist: authority name, the original request date, the internal review request date, the review outcome date, a summary of the review decision, your grounds for continuing to dispute it, and tick boxes for the five documents you are enclosing.
- It produces a letter addressed to the Information Commissioner at Wycliffe House, Wilmslow, headed as a complaint under section 50 of FOIA 2000, with a background section built from your three dates, a grounds section, and an explicit request for a Decision Notice.
- The enclosures list is generated from the ticked items only — original request, refusal response, internal review request, review outcome, related correspondence — and unticked items are left out entirely.
- Copy and print buttons, plus a note that the complaint can be submitted through ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint instead of by post.
When to use it
- When an internal review has upheld a refusal you still believe is wrong.
- When the authority has ignored your internal review request and you need to escalate.
- To assemble the chronology and evidence bundle before using the ICO online form.
- When you want a Decision Notice on the record — they are published, and they set expectations for future requests to the same body.
What it does not do
- The background narrative is fixed prose assuming a refusal followed by a completed internal review. The intro above the form now tells you to say so if the authority never responded at all or is not conducting the review, but the generated letter body does not adapt itself — that section still has to be rewritten by hand.
- There is no field for the authority’s own FOI reference number, which the ICO asks for, and the signature block is left as placeholders for your name, address, email and phone.
- It drafts; it does not submit. Nothing is sent, and the tool does not check whether you are inside the window the ICO expects — the ICO asks you to complain promptly, normally within three months of your last meaningful correspondence with the authority.
- The footer no longer gives a fixed timescale for a Decision Notice. It now says plainly that the ICO publishes no fixed service standard and that turnaround varies with caseload and complexity — there is still no way to predict when a Decision Notice will arrive, so do not plan a story around any figure you are given elsewhere.
- The postal address is correct but slow. The ICO’s own preferred route is the online complaint form.
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