TL;DR

Durham County Council is developing AI software to help it handle freedom of information (FOI) requests, many of which it believes residents are now drafting with AI, the BBC reported on Tuesday 6 October. The council fielded fewer requests last year than the year before, yet answered a smaller share on time, because each one took longer to deal with.

Fewer requests, more work

According to a council report, Durham received 1,258 FOI requests in the year from June 2025, which is 225 fewer than in the previous 12 months. Despite the lower volume, processing time went up. The council attributes this to requests becoming longer and more complicated, and suggests many were produced with AI tools. The result was a fall in the proportion answered within the expected 20 working days.

Kim Teasdale, who manages corporate data and insight at the council, said the authority was exploring AI to speed things up. Options include spotting and bundling similar requests and directing staff to past council answers on the same subject. A separate AI redaction tool is being considered to cut the time spent stripping personal details out of subject access requests.

Teasdale said the tools would help staff work faster and more consistently without losing accuracy, and that people would always oversee the process.

An arms race in paperwork

Durham’s experience echoes a point made elsewhere this week. In its new foresight study, the Law Society noted that more people are using AI tools to navigate legal proceedings and that inaccurate AI material is adding to the courts’ workload. In our view, the common thread is that AI makes it cheap to produce a long, formal-sounding request, while the cost of reading and answering it still falls on a public body.

Looking forward

Councils face an awkward choice. Using AI to triage AI-drafted requests may restore response times, but a wrongly grouped request or a missed redaction would still be the council’s mistake to answer for. Durham’s promise of human oversight is the right starting point. Any council seeing a similar rise in complexity will want to know how it measures accuracy before following suit, and whether the share of requests answered on time recovers.