Government spent over £1m on court cases to keep information secret
Whitehall departments spent seven-figure sum on legal fees to fight Freedom of Information requests
There’s a lot of news right now but a story yesterday really jumped out at me. “Suspicions grow that China is exploiting FOI laws to gather UK security data,” declared a headline in the Financial Times.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But the more I read, the more my eyebrow arched.
The anonymously-briefed warning that Beijing “may” be using Freedom of Information laws to get sensitive intel had lots of hearsay and conjecture - but that’s not the same as evidence (whatever the Simpsons’ resident dodgy lawyer Lionel Hutz might tell you).
What really worried me was a line buried near the end of the FT piece: “Officials are set to investigate whether further safeguards are needed within the FOI system.”
We have been here before. Successive governments have threatened to erode the public’s right to know - a right that Democracy for Sale fights hard to protect.
But what often goes unnoticed is that government doesn’t need to tighten the law to make it harder to get information. It can just spend public money fighting FOI requesters in court - which is exactly what it is doing.
A new investigation by Democracy for Sale has found that government departments spent over £1million on legal fees to fight Freedom of Information requests in 2024 and 2025.
These figures - which cover lawyers’ fees paid by Whitehall departments in cases taken to the Information Tribunal - were obtained after lengthy FOI battles. They are likely to be an underestimate as some ministries did not respond to our information requests.
Among the cases the government paid legal teams to fight were a request for information from families affected by the infected blood scandal, campaigners seeking details of the treatment of vulnerable benefit claimants, and a journalist investigating appointments to the House of Lords.
The Cabinet Office was the biggest spender, racking up £318,000 in legal fees. Among other things, the Cabinet Office - as Democracy for Sale previously reported - spent £32,000 fighting the release of a blank piece of paper.
The Department of Health and Social Care spent over £208,000 fighting FOI cases. The DWP, the third highest spender, paid £144,000 in legal fees on five cases.
“Spending over £1 million of public money to block the public’s right to know is a deeply damaging decision,” said Transparency International.
“FOI is not a bureaucratic inconvenience - it is vital to democratic accountability. The public interest would be far better served by the government embracing the Freedom of Information Act than repeatedly frustrating it,” said Rose Whiffen, senior research officer at Transparency International.
Among those who had to fight for their right to information was infected blood campaigner Jason Evans.
Evans was just four years old when his father, Jonathan, died of Aids in 1993. Jonathan had been given blood infected with HIV and hepatitis C.
Decades later, as the government dragged its feet over compensation for victims of one of the gravest failures in the history of the NHS, Evans sent an FOI request about a proposed payment scheme to the Department of Health - which released a small amount of information but withheld the rest.
Evans complained to the Information Commissioner, which ordered further disclosure. But rather than release the information, the government appealed the decision.
The appeal was dismissed by an Information Tribunal, but not before the DHSC had spent over £41,000 on legal fees.
Historian Andrew Lownie, who fought numerous FOI battles in researching his ground-breaking book on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, said that he “regularly encountered ranks of expensive lawyers when I have challenged decisions by the Information Commissioner.”
Lownie spent a decade successfully fighting for the release of Lord Mountbatten’s diaries. “My own legal costs there with one barrister and solicitor was £500,000 so I hate to think what the Cabinet Office spent. Of course they would not say,” Lownie said, adding:
“Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to release the material in the first place?”
The Cabinet Office, which sets FOI policy across Whitehall, spent £318,000 on 15 cases. This figure is likely to be higher as the department did not disclose spending on a further five cases.
The Cabinet Office’s spend includes over £75,000 fighting Democracy for Sale’s long-running case about the government’s notorious Covid VIP PPE lane.
The department also spent £15,000 trying - and failing - to prevent journalist Martin Rosenbaum from accessing letters about the appointment of two peers by Boris Johnson.
“It’s foolish and absurd for the Cabinet Office to spend £15,000 on legal fees in its unsuccessful attempt to stop me discovering the reasons given for some of Boris Johnson’s peerage nominations,” Rosenbaum told Democracy for Sale. “This kind of material should be publicly available as a basic principle.”
Other departments spent tens of thousands of pounds resisting disclosure, too. The Ministry of Defence spent over £23,000 trying to block the release of blood tests to the family of a nuclear test veteran. The Home Office fought the release of an internal report into the Windrush scandal before a judge ordered it disclosed.
Democracy for Sale previously revealed that the government spent at least £937,000 on Information Tribunal cases listed for a hearing in 2023. Since then, the Tribunal has stopped publicly listing its cases, making it impossible to know which cases the government is fighting.
Our investigation found a repeated pattern: protracted legal fights, large bills for government lawyers, and frequent rulings that disclosure is in the public interest.
Democracy for Sale has seen this first-hand. Last year, we fought four FOI cases at tribunal - and won them all.
The FT yesterday quoted Tory MP Alicia Kearns saying that the government needs to tighten FOI to stop “any Tsarist, Ayatollah-linked or Little Red Book-carrying man” obtaining information.
Back on planet earth, the reality is that FOI law already has exemptions to protect national security - and getting information via FOI has become increasing difficult.
Transparency across Whitehall has fallen to its lowest level since records began, with departments responding in full to just 29% of FOI requests in 2024.
The public has a right to know. That’s why we will continue to take cases to tribunal, investigate what departments try to hide, fight secrecy and defend FOI as a cornerstone of democratic accountability.
If Ministers were forced to pay legal costs, fighting FOI’s, out of their own pockets, they’d soon change their tune.
how dare they!