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One reason which a public authority can use to turn down an FOI request is that the information is already 'intended for future publication'.

But how soon do they have to be intending to publish it? In , this exemption can only be used when the information is to be published within twelve weeks.

In the rest of the UK, there's no fixed time limit - it's a matter of what is 'reasonable in all the circumstances' and where the balance of the public interest lies. I've found requests which have been rejected where it's planned to make the material public a lot more than twelve weeks away - several months for example -but until now nothing quite like .

As reported in paragraph 48 of the Information Tribunal's judgment, one argument proposed in this case by the Office for National Statistics is that the information should be withheld because they were going to release it anyway - in 2021, a small matter of 15 years after the request was made.

The Tribunal describes this argument as 'questionable' but did not have to consider it fully because the ONS actually had a much stronger reason for not revealing the records at issue (census data from 1921), which it upheld.

But perhaps the ONS approach could be extended a little to turning down requests because information would be disclosed in 30 years time under the current 30 year rule? (Or maybe I should have kept that idea to myself).

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