NHS FOI Tracker

The shape of central-government health FOI: nine topics, one dominant

28 August 2026

With several hundred FOI releases now classified into this tracker, a clear shape has emerged in what central government health bodies are actually asked about. Ranked by volume:

  1. Medicines & Regulation — by far the largest, built mostly from the MHRA's weekly disclosure rhythm (see our dedicated piece).
  2. Hospital Trusts & Estates — largely historical, carried by Monitor's 2015–2017 archive (see why NHS trusts are mostly absent here).
  3. NHS Staffing & Pay — agency staff use, nurse vacancies, and NHS pay policy, mostly from the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS Pay Review Body.
  4. Mental Health Services — a smaller but consistent stream of requests about crisis care and psychiatric detention.
  5. Public Health & Outbreaks, Social Care, Pandemic Response, NHS Waiting Times and GP & Primary Care — each present but comparatively thin in this dataset.

The imbalance is a coverage artefact, not a demand signal

It would be easy to read this ranking as "the public asks about medicines regulation eight times more than NHS waiting times" — but that would be the wrong conclusion. Waiting times are one of the most FOI'd and most publicly discussed subjects in UK healthcare; the reason it barely registers here is that granular waiting-list data is disclosed at trust level, and as we've written about separately, individual trusts mostly don't publish on GOV.UK at all. What this ranking actually reflects is closer to "how prolific is each central-government body's own disclosure log," which is a very different thing from public demand.

Why we still think this view is useful

Even with that caveat, a central-government-only view has real value: it's the layer of FOI activity that's hardest to track any other way, precisely because it's scattered across department press offices and one-off publication pages rather than living in a small number of trust disclosure logs a local journalist would already know to check. Regulatory and policy-level FOI — what the MHRA is being asked about a drug licence, what DHSC is being asked about a policy decision — doesn't have an obvious single home to watch. That's the gap this site is trying to fill, not a substitute for trust-level transparency, which belongs on trust websites and, ideally, dedicated tools built to cover that layer specifically.