Sanders v Information Commissioner: when FOIA becomes a surrogate appeal route

The First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber) has upheld a decision notice issued by the Information Commissioner, confirming that the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) was entitled under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to refuse 32 information requests as vexatious. The judgement, handed down on 31 March 2026, offers a detailed application of the Dransfield framework to a case involving a high volume of correspondence, a vulnerable appellant with autism spectrum disorder, and allegations of institutional misconduct.

The appellant, Steve Sanders, had originally complained to FOS about AXA Insurance following a series of sewage floods at his former home between 2007 and 2014. After FOS accepted, belatedly, that it had wrongly turned him away for several years, his complaint was eventually taken on — only to be dismissed by an Ombudsman in February 2022. That dismissal prompted the FOIA campaign at the heart of this appeal.

Between February and December 2022, Mr Sanders submitted 32 requests seeking internal guidance, staff codes of conduct, training materials, IT storage data, call-recording procedures, and even a copy of a 2018 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary critical of FOS. These were part of a broader pattern: FOS recorded 110 information requests between January 2020 and June 2023. By early 2023, total email contact had reached an estimated 800–900 messages, many copied to approximately 200 recipients across the organisation. FOS reported that the volume temporarily overloaded its inbound email queues, impairing routine operations.

The Tribunal conducted a full merits review under section 58 FOIA and applied the four Dransfield factors holistically. On burden, it found the resource impact exceptional: one set of guidance materials alone was estimated to require 25 hours of work from around 39 senior staff. Even setting those specific figures aside, the Tribunal held that the sustained, multi-directorate nature of the correspondence met the Dransfield threshold independently. On motive, the Tribunal accepted that Mr Sanders acted in good faith and without improper intent, but found the dominant purpose was perpetuating a private dispute that FOS had repeatedly indicated was closed. It emphasised that FOIA cannot function as an appeal mechanism or indirect route to compel reconsideration of concluded decisions. On value, whilst acknowledging some public interest in FOS transparency, the Tribunal found the incremental benefit of compelling responses to the full portfolio was modest against the burden imposed, with many requests being highly specific to Mr Sanders' own case. On harassment, the Tribunal declined to find intentional harassment but accepted that the objective effect — the tone of some correspondence, the wide distribution, and the volume — had a harassing impact on staff.

The judgement addresses with particular care Mr Sanders' submissions regarding his autism and Asperger's diagnoses, which he argued influenced his communication style, including the need to send corrections, clarifications and follow-up messages. The Tribunal acknowledged that disability can legitimately affect communication patterns and that such behaviour should not automatically be treated as unreasonable. Nonetheless, it held that section 14(1) is concerned with the objective effect of requests on a public authority's resources, not the requester's intent or the reasons underpinning their approach. That distinction is likely to be significant in future cases where cognitive or mental health conditions are raised in mitigation.

The Tribunal also confirmed that the Information Commissioner was correct to delineate his jurisdiction — he was not obliged to investigate whether FOS had complied with its own DISP procedures, and his refusal to do so did not render the section 14(1) determination irrational. Whether the statutory route of a section 50 complaint was available and preferable was relevant to proportionality, even where a requester had been advised to exhaust internal procedures first.

The appeal was refused and the decision notice upheld.

Copyright & permissions