J S Hughes v The Information Commissioner

On considering the written representations of the parties, the Tribunal unanimously determines that the appeal is dismissed. Reasons Introduction

1. We will refer to the Appellant as Mrs Hughes and the Respondent as the Commissioner.

2. By this appeal, Mrs Hughes challenges the decision of the Commissioner upholding a public authority’s refusal to provide information requested under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (‘FOIA’) on the ground that the request was vexatious.

3. The appeal was listed before us on 12 February 2026 for consideration on the papers. We were satisfied that it was just and proportionate to determine the matter without a hearing.

4. We had before us a bundle of documents of some 560 pages. In addition, Mrs Hughes submitted sundry further documents after the bundle had been completed.

5. Having considered the matter with care, we arrived at the unanimous conclusion embodied in our Decision above. Background

6. On 19 October, 3 November, 8 November and 11 November 2024 Mrs Hughes wrote to the Insolvency Service (‘the Agency’), each time in identical terms, purporting to seek information as follows: Please be advised that in accordance with Section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act The Insolvency Service is required to provide the response and disclosures requested to also include the following :- A Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have complied with the provisions of the FOIA. B Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have complied with the requirement to issue a refusal notice which complies with the legislation. C Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have complied with the entitlement of the applicant under the FOIA and the EIR to be informed whether the information requested is held and, if so, to have that information communicated or made available to them (assuming no exemptions apply). D Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have complied with the requirement to provide the applicant with a refusal notice which states any relevant exemptions from the duty to comply and why. E Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have complied with the requirement to provide the applicant with a refusal Notice which explains, if applicable, why the public interest in maintaining the exemptions outweighs the public interest in disclosing theinformation in all the circumstances of the case. F Confirmation that the applicant has been informed of any internal review procedure operated by The Insolvency Service. G Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have conducted an internal review of the applicant’s disclosure requests. H Confirmation that The Insolvency Service have informed the applicant of the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office under section 50 of the FOIA.

7. The Agency responded on 26 November 2024, citing FOIA, s14 and refusing the request on the ground that it was vexatious.

8. Mrs Hughes raised a challenge and an internal review followed but the Agency’s stance was unchanged.

9. Mrs Hughes then complained to the Commissioner about the way in which the Agency had dealt with her request. An investigation followed.

10. The Agency’s factual narrative as presented case to the Commissioner is fairly summarised in this extract from his Decision Notice (opinions and comments excluded):

16. In addition to the Agency’s explanations to the complainant in its refusal notice and in the outcome of the internal review it provided further explanations to the Commissioner as laid out below.

17. The Agency operates a 3 tier complaints procedure. The complainant complained about the handling of an insolvency matter which escalated through each of these tiers and on to the relevant ombudsman (the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman – PHSO). The complainant then tried to complain about a different aspect of the same matter. It responded to these later complaints to say that it would not be accepting them under the complaints procedure.

18. The complainant persisted in contacting the Agency and was eventually warned (on 12/07/23) that if she persisted the Agency would cease to respond to her under our unreasonable individual behaviour policy.

19. In October 2024 the Agency disengaged generally from corresponding with this complainant due to her behaviour in respect of a complaint she had made about the granting of a Debt Relief Order (DRO) for a case in which she was a creditor (i.e. she was owed money by the debtor) dating back to 2021.

20. The Agency provided copies of the notice of disengagement that it sent to the complainant on 21 October 2024 and a precis ‘summary of contact’ of that disengagement written to its parent department, the Department for Business and Trade. The Agency also added that it had received over 200 emails from the complainant since 18 December 2021 up until 19 November 2024. Some of these the Agency had only been CC’d into, but there is still the burden of simply reviewing such emails to check whether any action is necessary and then filing them.

21. A number of emails have been ‘quarantined’ (and remain unread) due to the inclusion of profanity…

22. The requests of late 2024 are confused and relate in themselves to matters dealt with fully by the Agency over a year prior in 2023. The complainant seems to be attempting to use FOI to obtain responses to letters she sent to the Agency because it did not at the time reply to her repetitive complaints, as per paragraphs 18 and 19 above…

23. It is characteristic of this complainant to send the same, or very similar, correspondence on subsequent days, often making very minor changes to the body of the letter.

24. It is noteworthy that the complainant is known (via the Agency being copied into correspondence) to have exhibited the same unreasonable persistence in complaints against other organisations and individuals (including the Commissioner’s office)…

25. In fact, despite the Agency upholding the section 14 refusal at internal review the complainant continued to send substantially the same letter attempting to engage the Agency in further correspondence on 19 December 2024, 23 December 2024 and 24 December 2024 (copies provided to the Commissioner), before then directing correspondence to the Commissioner directly.

11. The Commissioner also noted Mrs Hughes’s position, strongly denying acting vexatiously and contending that the Agency had relied on FOIA, s14 only to conceal its own maladministration.

12. The huge bundle of documents before us substantiates the factual account put forward by the Agency in the course of the Commissioner’s investigation.

13. By his Decision Notice dated 20 January 2025 the Commissioner determined that the request was vexatious and the Agency had been entitled to refuse it on that ground.

14. By her notice of appeal and accompanying (enormous) ‘skeleton argument’ dated 10 September 2025 Mrs Hughes challenged the Commissioner’s determination. The vast majority of this material was directed to her underlying grievances which formed the basis of her original complaints to the Agency.

15. The Commissioner served a very brief response dated 14 October 2025, relying on the grounds set out in the Decision Notice.

16. In these proceedings, Mrs Hughes has bombarded the Tribunal with repetitious applications and complaints. To give one example, she applied for the Commissioner’s case to be struck out for non-compliance with a case management direction. The application was refused by Judge Harris on 23 October 2024 for reasons stated and fresh directions were issued. Undaunted, Mrs Hughes made an identical application in December 2024, which Judge Muzaffer refused on 19 January 2026 on the ground that (apart from anything else) the matter had already been determined and could not be revisited. When the matter came before us, Mrs Hughes was in breach of a direction to file a Certificate of Compliance. We decided to overlook the breach since we were in a position to engage with the substance of the case. The Law

17. By FOIA, s14(1), a public authority is excused from complying with a request for information in accordance with s1(1) if the request is ‘vexatious’. In Dransfield v Information Commissioner and Devon County Council [2012] UKUT 440 (AAC) , the UT (Judge Nicholas Wikeley), at para 27, expressed agreement with an earlier first-instance decision that – … “vexatious”, connotes manifestly unjustified, inappropriate or improper use of a formal procedure. The judge continued (para 28): Such misuse of the FOIA procedure may be evidenced in a number of different ways. It may be helpful to consider the question of whether a request is truly vexatious by considering four broad issues or themes – (1) the burden (on the public authority and its staff); (2) the motive (of the requester); (3) the value or serious purpose (of the request) and (4) any harassment or distress (of and to staff). However, these four considerations … are not intended to be exhaustive, nor are they meant to create an alternative formulaic check-list.

18. Dransfield and a conjoined case were further appealed to the Court of Appeal. Giving the only substantial judgment (reported at [2015] 1 WLR 5316 ), Arden LJ (as she then was) did not question the UT’s guidance, but added these remarks (para 68): In my judgment, the UT was right not to attempt to provide any comprehensive or exhaustive definition. It would be better to allow the meaning of the phrase to be winnowed out in cases that arise. However, for my own part, in the context of FOIA, I consider that the emphasis should be on an objective standard and that the starting point is that vexatiousness primarily involves making a request which has no reasonable foundation, that is, no reasonable foundation for thinking that the information sought would be of value to the requester, or to the public or any section of the public. Parliament has chosen a strong word which therefore means that the hurdle of satisfying it is a high one, and this is consistent with the constitutional nature of the right. The decision-maker should consider all the relevant circumstances in order to reach a balanced conclusion as to whether a request is vexatious.

19. The appeal is brought pursuant to FOIA, s57. The Tribunal’s powers in determining the appeal are delineated in s58 as follows: (1) If on an appeal under section 57 the Tribunal consider – (a) that the notice against which the appeal is brought is not in accordance with the law; or (b) to the extent that the notice involved an exercise of discretion by the Commissioner, that he ought to have exercised his discretion differently, the Tribunal shall allow the appeal or substitute such other notice as could have been served by the Commissioner, and in any other case the Tribunal shall dismiss the appeal. (2) On such an appeal, the Tribunal may review any finding of fact on which the notice in question was based. Analysis and Conclusions

20. In our view this appeal is without merit and the Commissioner’s decision was plainly right, for the following reasons. First, the requests have no serious purpose. They ask for no substantive information. They simply ask pointless questions about the Agency’s compliance (or non-compliance) with its information rights obligations. If she had sensible grounds for thinking that the Agency was in breach of its obligations, she might (or might not) have a tenable basis for a complaint to the Commissioner, but no good reason to ask the Agency questions purportedly under FOIA. And if she had no rational grounds for suspecting the Agency of breaching its information rights obligations, she would have no business to trouble it for a second opinion.

21. Second (an extension of the first point), the requests illustrate the unhealthy tendency of many presenters of vexatious requests towards what the UT in Dransfield called ‘vexatiousness by drift’, which involves broadening the areas of inquiry from the original substance to matters of (at best) tangential relevance. The requests here cannot even claim tangential relevance.

22. Third, the diminution in value of the information requested brings with it the further, closely-related and no less undesirable consequence that any public interest in it is correspondingly reduced. Here, the requests obviously have no possible public interest whatsoever.

23. Fourth, the repetition of the requests (the same request was sent four times in three weeks) strongly suggests a clear objective of harassing the Agency. This can only be seen as an abuse of the important constitutional right to freedom of information, which does not exist to satisfy improper motives of this sort.

24. Fifth, although our focus must be on the vexatiousness (or not) of the requests rather than the requester, the extraordinary prior history of repeated complaints and challenges addressed to the Agency between 2021 and 2024 provides compelling support for the argument that the requests under consideration here were vexatious.

25. Sixth, Mrs Hughes’s behaviour in these proceedings furnishes similar support for the Commissioner’s position. Her conduct of the appeal could almost be seen as making his case for him.

26. Seventh, the style and tone of some of Mrs Hughes’s communications addressed to the Agency (leading to quarantining on profanity grounds) again tend in the same direction. As the UT in Dransfield noted, such behaviour often features where vexatious requests for information are made. Outcome

27. For the reasons stated, we are satisfied to a very high standard that the Commissioner’s decision was correct and in accordance with the law. The appeal is dismissed.

28. Our finding is only that the requests before us were vexatious. We have not found that Mrs Hughes is a vexatious person. But we hope that she will think carefully in future before putting herself at risk of any further finding of having made vexatious requests. FOIA exists to safeguard freedom of information. It was not enacted to serve as a tool for furthering personal campaigns and causes, however heartfelt they may be. (Signed) Anthony Snelson Judge of the First-tier Tribunal Dated: 20 March 2026