Town and parish councils are public authorities under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. That means any person can ask your council for recorded information, and the council must respond promptly and in any event within 20 working days. This guide explains how that deadline works in practice — and the handful of places clerks most often trip up.

What counts as an FOI request

A valid request under the Act must simply be in writing (letter or email), give the requester’s name, give an address for correspondence (an email address is fine), and describe the information wanted. The requester does not have to mention “FOI”, and they do not have to say why they want the information. If it arrives in writing and describes recorded information you hold, treat it as an FOI request.

Counting the 20 working days

The clock starts on the working day after the request is received, and “working days” exclude weekends and bank holidays.

  • Day 0 — the day the request lands in your inbox.
  • Day 1 — the next working day. This is where counting begins.
  • You must respond by the 20th working day.

A request that arrives late on a Friday, or over a bank-holiday weekend, does not start eating into the deadline until the next working day. The safest habit is to log every request the day it arrives with its due date already calculated, so nothing slips.

When you can take longer

There are only limited reasons to go beyond 20 working days:

  • Public-interest test. If you are relying on a qualified exemption and need more time to weigh the public interest, you may extend by a reasonable further period — but you must tell the requester, within the original 20 days, that you are doing so and by roughly when they will hear back.
  • Clarification. If the request is genuinely unclear, you can ask the requester to clarify. The clock effectively pauses until they reply — but you must ask promptly, not on day 19.

You cannot extend simply because the office is busy or the clerk is on leave. Build the cover in.

Fees and “too expensive” requests

Parish councils can refuse a request if finding and extracting the information would exceed the appropriate cost limit. If you refuse on cost grounds, you must still respond within 20 working days with a refusal notice, and it is good practice to help the requester narrow the request so it falls within the limit.

Getting it right every time

The failures the ICO sees most from small councils are mundane: a request missed because it went to a personal inbox, a deadline miscounted, or no audit trail of what was sent and when. The fix is process, not heroics — one place to log the request, the clock running automatically, and a record of the response.

How Town Desk handles this

In Town Desk you log an FOI request under Governance → Requests. It’s given a reference (e.g. FOI-0001) and the 20-working-day due date is worked out for you from the date received, skipping weekends automatically — you just nudge it if a bank holiday falls in the window. Open requests show on the governance dashboard with open and overdue counts, and every step is recorded on the request’s timeline through to responded or closed. Because residents’ contact and history already sit in one joined-up system, finding what you actually hold is far quicker.

See the governance features, or book a demo to walk a request through end to end.

This guide is general information for UK town & parish councils, not legal advice. For the authoritative position, see the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance.