The 20-Day Promise That Disappears

You ask a council for information it is legally required to hold. The law gives it 20 working days to make a decision and tell you. In many cases that deadline passes in silence. What follows is not a quick fix. It is a formal process that has historically taken around 100 days to produce a result. By the time it ends, the information may still not have been released.

This is how the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 works for many people.

What the law requires

Section 13 of the LGOIMA requires a local authority to decide whether to grant a request, and in what form, “as soon as reasonably practicable, and in no case later than 20 working days” after the request is received. The decision must be communicated to the requester. Twenty days is the outer limit, not the expected timeline. The main duty is to act as soon as reasonably practicable.

Working days exclude weekends, public holidays, and the period from 25 December to 15 January. The clock starts the day after the request arrives. The Ombudsman publishes a calculator because the rules are precise and easy to stretch.

Once a decision to release information is made, it must be provided without undue delay. The decision and the release are separate obligations. A council cannot lawfully decide to grant a request and then sit on the material.

How the 20 days are ignored

Councils regularly treat the deadline as flexible. Common patterns include:

• No response at all by day 21. This is a delay that can be taken straight to the Ombudsman.
• Extensions notified late or on weak grounds. Section 14 allows an extension only for a large volume of material that would unreasonably interfere with operations, or for consultations that cannot reasonably be completed in time. The notice must be sent within the original 20 working days, state the new period and the reasons, and advise the requester of the right to complain. “We are busy” is not, by itself, a valid reason.
• A decision that says the information will be released, followed by further delay in actually providing it.

Ombudsman data show that delays in making decisions remain one of the most common categories of LGOIMA complaints.

What happens after you complain

You do not need to complain to the council first. A delay or refusal can go directly to the Ombudsman under section 27 of the LGOIMA.

The Ombudsman’s current approach to pure delay complaints focuses on early resolution. Staff contact the agency quickly. If the agency promptly acknowledges the breach and issues a decision, the complaint is often closed without a full investigation. If the agency cannot produce a decision in a short period, the Ombudsman is likely to open a formal investigation, form a provisional opinion, and give the agency one to two weeks to comment. If the matter is still unresolved, a final opinion follows and recommendations may be made.

In earlier periods the average time to complete a delay complaint was about 97 days. Recent process changes have brought some averages down, but office-wide targets remain 70 percent of all complaints completed within three months and 80 percent within six months. These are performance goals, not legal deadlines. A case in which the agency is slow to respond, or one that raises substantive withholding issues, can still take substantially longer.

The recommendation a council can reject

If the Ombudsman recommends that information be released, section 32 of the LGOIMA creates a public duty on the local authority to observe that recommendation from the 21st working day after it is made. There is an exception: before that day the council may pass a resolution at a meeting deciding not to follow the recommendation. It must record the decision in writing, notify the Ombudsman and the requester, and publish it.

This is a deliberate feature of the Act. It means a majority of elected members can decline to implement an Ombudsman’s recommendation on official information. The remaining route for the requester is judicial review, which is costly and uncertain. In cases involving politically sensitive material, the sequence of delay past 20 days, further time through the Ombudsman process, then a resolution to refuse remains available.

What to do

Make the request in writing and keep a clear record of the date it was received. Calculate the deadline and note day 21. If no decision has been communicated and no valid extension notice was given within the original 20 working days, complain to the Ombudsman promptly. Supply the request, evidence of receipt, and a short statement that no decision has been made. Early complaints on pure delay are the cases most likely to be resolved quickly under the current approach.

If an extension is given, check whether the stated reasons match section 14. Thin justifications can themselves be complained about. Once a decision to release is made, follow up if the material does not arrive without further delay.

The principle in section 5 of the LGOIMA is that official information shall be made available unless there is good reason to withhold it. The time limits exist to make that principle enforceable. When the 20-day maximum is routinely treated as optional and the subsequent complaint process stretches toward 100 days, information becomes available only after any inconvenience of releasing it has reduced. The structure of the Act allows this outcome.