Please can you supply me with a complete list of all previous electricity price cap figures?

I have searched your website and can only find the current price-cap.

Specifically, I would like to know the per kWh price cap for electricity in the London region from its introduction until today.

If these are on your website, please point me in the right direction. If not, a CSV of the data would be appreciated.”

A month later, and without any fuss, they emailed me a comprehensive spreadsheet. In Excel format, but let's not quibble!

There are a few formatting oddities - not least that the caps are expressed with 13 decimal places of precision. Was the daily cap really 60.9345205479452p?

Similarly, the dates are expressed as 1 April 2022 to 30 September 2022 rather than programmatic date ranges. It's also inconsistent, with some saying 1 July to 30 September 2025.

Averages are hard-coded not calculated.

I've requested that they add these data to their website but, until they do, here's the original file they sent me.

I've used a bit of R to tidy them up, giving proper start date and end date columns, rounding to 2 decimal places, and saving as CSV. You can download the tidied version.

Copyright and Copyleft

As per their copyright page these data are © Ofgem, 2026 and are licensed under the Open Government Licence 3.0. This is compatible with CC BY and ODC-By.

Please treat my update as Creative Commons Attribution.

As a prolific⁴ user of Untappd - the social network for beer drinkers - I'm always on the lookout for a beer I've never met before⁵. So I was delighted to see this on offer: What ho! A exclusive beer! Rather! I generously let mine host pay for it and enjoyed quaffing it.

But eagle-eyed⁶ readers may have noticed something odd about the the beer's lens. There's no indication of who the brewer is and what the alcoholic strength is⁷.

I didn't feel like quizzing the innocent barkeep⁸ so I did the next best thing. I immediately⁹ sent a Freedom of Information request to the House of Lords. About beer.

Fair play to those poor souls in the records office, they replied pretty sharpish to my somewhat frivolous request.

Who is the brewer of this beer?

The House Administration holds this information. The brewer is Greene King.

What is the beer’s ABV?

The House Administration holds this information. The ABV of the beer is 4%.

Hurrah! Success!

Now, you may think this is a trivial thing to use FoI for. And, to a certain degree, you're right. But the point about FoI is that you never know what you're going to uncover.

For example, is it illegal to sell beer in Parliament without displaying the ABV?¹⁰

Given the Baron Bilimoria sits in the House of Lords and invented Cobra Beer - was there some sort of kickback scheme here?¹¹

Would the team refuse the FoI because their record keeping is disastrous and finding simple information would be too onerous?¹²

As someone who has been on the receiving end of one-or-two¹³ FoI requests of varying degrees of vindictiveness, I feel a little guilty about sending something which seems so spurious.

But, I truly believe, that our rights are like a muscle. We have to regularly exercise them. Sometimes we'll uncover something interesting, other times something important, and occasionally something unexpected. And, for this request, something utterly mundane.

So here's a cheers to everyone at the HoL for answering my question so promptly 🍻

A few months ago, I received a mysterious £25 from National Savings and Investments. A prize from the Premium Bonds! Not enough to make me rich, but enough for a takeaway. Oddly, after checking their app and website, I could find no record of the win. Curious.

A few days later, this letter popped through my door.

My bond was one of a tranche purchased in 2013. I sold it in 2019, yet it won in 2024!

Why was the person ineligible to win? Why had it come through to me?

This is a question lots of people have asked, with general confusion.

A letter to the Guardian in 2011 discusses what happens to a deceased prize-winner's money:

In real life a prize like this would be reallocated to the next eligible bond number.

There's a similar suggestion from an article in This is Money from 2018:

Under scheme rules, bonds can stay in the draw for up to 12 months [after the bond holder dies] and any prize can be claimed by the estate. After this, the bond is no longer eligible to win and prizes should go to the next allocated number.

So, in my case, did someone die before I cashed out in 2019? If so, why was my number chosen and why did it take so long?

I might not get answers to my specific case, but I raised a Freedom of Information request to find out what makes people ineligible, how prizes are reallocated, and how many were paid out in the last year.

This is what I found out.

Reasons why a Bond holder would be ineligible to receive a prize:

As well as death, there are two other reasons why a "winning" bond may not be eligible.

• Account in Excess – where a customer is found to be holding over their maximum Premium Bonds allowance
• Incomplete Sales – where the application is under query at the time of the draw. […] If the sale is cancelled, the investment is returned and the prize is reallocated

That all seems pretty reasonable. But how does an ineligible bond get reallocated?

Details of the reallocation process

They didn't describe the actual technical process in any detail,

[…] on making a prize ineligible, the system will automatically move prize winners up and identify any winners at the top of each prize value boundary that need a supplementary prize payment. For example, if a £1,000 prize was deemed ineligible, the system will move the top £500 prize winner up and note they are due an additional £500 prize. […] This will continue to the first eligible bond out of the draw that missed out on a prize, and they will be moved up to receive a £25 prize payment for that month.

Aha! It is possible that someone higher up the prize ladder was removed and a whole bunch of us took a step up.

I wonder how often this happens?

Last Year

I had hoped for a bit more detail, such as the total number of bonds reallocated, but I'm satisfied enough with this answer:

In the last year, the range of prizes made ineligible was £25 to £50,000. We made one £50,000 prize ineligible and this was due to being notified of the death of one of our customers[…]. In this event the move ups took place as detailed above to a £25,000 winner and then to all prize values below this.

So someone won £25k and then, a few months later, got another £25k! Lucky!

Freedom of Information is brilliant

Huge thanks to What Do They Know for providing such an excellent platform. It really made sending an FoI easy. If I ever win it big on the Premium Bonds, I'll up my donation to them!

Sometimes these questions are sensible and journalistic. Sometimes they're vexatious. Sometimes they're a little silly.

The silly ones can be fun to answer. It's a good chance for a politician to show their human side. It's pretty hard to get wrong. I mean, unless the question is "What's the Minister's favourite pop song?" and they answer "I'm the Leader of the Gang by Garry Glitter".

Someone has send an FoI request asking:

Please, could you tell me the chancellor's preferred brand and type of biscuit?

Ah! That's a brilliant question. An absolute home-run for any politician. Unless, to mix your metaphors, you score an own goal.

The official response says:

We can confirm that the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has a preference for Jaffa Cakes

This is despicable!

The UK's tax revenue office, HMRC, fought McVities (manufacturer of Jaffa Cakes) at a VAT tribunal in 1991. The crux of the case was this: chocolate covered biscuits attract VAT, chocolate covered cakes do not. Are Jaffa Cakes biscuits?

The answer?

The leading case on the borderline is that concerning Jaffa cakes: United Biscuits (LON/91/0160). Customs and Excise had accepted since the start of VAT that Jaffa cakes were zero-rated as cakes, but always had misgivings about whether this was correct. Following a review, the department reversed its view of the liability. Jaffa cakes were then ruled to be biscuits partly covered in chocolate and standard-rated: United Biscuits (as McVities, one of the largest manufacturers of Jaffa cakes) appealed against this decision.

Taking all these factors into account, Jaffa cakes had characteristics of both cakes and biscuits, but the tribunal thought they had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated.

VFOOD6260 - Excepted items: Confectionery: The bounds of confectionery, sweets, chocolates, chocolate biscuits, cakes and biscuits: The borderline between cakes and biscuits

Jaffa Cakes are not biscuits. The law says so!

Now, Hunt isn't the first politician to make this mistake - First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon also made the same dubious claim. But, unlike Hunt, she presumably wasn't steeped in the day-to-day minutiae of tax affairs.

There's a serious point to my ramblings. It's always easy to give an off-the-cuff answer to a trivial question. But there'll always be some know-it-all who treats a lack of precision as evidence of a deep moral or intellectual failing. This is the reason why public figures are (usually) so guarded about their answers and have everything triple checked by professionals. It's easy for a slip of the tongue or a colloquialism to be aggressively misinterpreted.

Just as I am doing here.

The Irish government recently complied with a Freedom of Information Act request from journalists at RTÉ.

The journalists wanted copies of messages sent via a WhatsApp group. The Irish government complied and sent out several pages of documents. Let's take a look at three of the core mistakes that they made.

Marker Pens

The redaction process appears to be drawing over the offending words with a marker pen.

When the ink is insufficiently dark, as in this example, we can clearly make out the word which is being deleted.

Even when the ink is quite thick, we can digitally enhance the picture to clearly see some letters.

We only need a few letters to discover even more information.

Fixed Width Fonts

The font that this blog is written in uses a proportional font. The letter M is physically wider than the letter I.

The FOI response uses a monospace font - where every letter is the same length.

This allows us to accurately count how long a word is.

This is particularly useful in working out who is speaking - for example ALICE will take up more horizontal space than BOB.

Even using proportional fonts is not a guarantee that information will stay hidden - but there's no doubt monospace makes information recovery easier.

Coverage

As you can see at the top of the page, not all the letters have been covered.

We can make a good guess that any vertical line is likely to be one of the letters IJKLbdhlt.

Each of those letters has a unique layout in a monospaced font.

Using our knowledge of the font, the partial exposure, and how the English language is composed, we can make a reasonable guess at what some of the words are.

Our knowledge of English-language idioms may allow us to guess the next set of letters.

Thoughts

This post isn't intended to convince people to be more closed - but rather to encourage more openness.

These sort of physical redactions offer little protection against the determined reader. It's the digital equivalent putting your door on the latch rather than locking it.

We've known for over a decade that it is possible to recover information from improperly redacted documents.

Scanned documents are difficult for researchers to use. Equally, delivering an FOI response in a non-accessible format is likely to be a breach of the rights of disabled citizens.

The correct response, in my personal opinion, is to take a digital copy of the records to be released and replace every instance of sensitive information with [REDACTED] or [23 WORDS REDACTED]. That way there can no possibility of accidentally revealing information. Of course, if you leave "track changes" on - the data may still be there.

Using ineffective techniques raises the the risk of unwanted information leakage.

I got a letter from Black Rod - who runs both houses […] and it says that I am banned for life from the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

It's at the 7 minute 20 mark on the video - or listen to the whole thing on SoundCloud.

"Hmmm…" I wondered, "Who else has been banned from Parliament?"

TO THE BAT-FREEDOM OF INFORMATION MACHINE, ROBIN!

Using the excellent What Do They Know site, I fired off an FoI request to the House of Commons.

I quickly received this back:

The House of Commons has not banned any person, therefore does not hold this information.

I notice in your request you mention Black Rod. It may interest you to know that Black Rod is a senior officer in the House of Lords. As our response only deals with people banned by the House of Commons you may wish to consider forwarding your request to the House of Lords

Carole Fisher - Information Rights and Information Security (IRIS) Service | House of Commons

While waiting for an answer, I'd done a little research and discovered that the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was banned from Parliament.

The letter mentions that she should be added to the "Index Expungatoris" - a list of people banned from Parliament. (NB this is also referred to as the the "Index Expurgatorius")

I wrote to the House of Lords and specifically mentioned the "Index". Their reply was swift:

The House Administration does not hold "a list of people who have been banned from Parliament." A search has been conducted and no recorded information relevant to your request has been located.

Frances Grey - Freedom of Information Officer - House of Lords

So! There you have it. If you think that you have been banned from Parliament, it seems that they don't hold any records and you are free to enter.

✱ This does NOT constitute legal advice!

As part of a minor act of disobedience, I decided to send two Freedom of Information requests. The first to the Home Secretary asking for her email metadata. The second to the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey asking for her web browsing history. After all, if they can spy on me, why can't I spy on how they're using their taxpayer-funded computers?

Unsurprisingly, the Home Office rejected my request saying that it was "vexatious" and it was a "scattergun approach and seems solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed."

Well duh! Of course, in so doing, they rather eloquently prove my point - trawling vast troves of data with no idea what you're looking for is a dangerous pursuit.

What was more surprising is that Surrey Police approved my request!

(I have to declare that I know some of the people within Surrey Police - having worked alongside them at various hackdays and BarCamps. That said, I doubt that influenced their decision to publish.)

I started out by making an FoI request on Twitter (a perfectly valid way to make a request).

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @DameLynneOwens@CCLynneOwens please can I have a list of your Internet history from your work computer and phone. Consider this an #FoI request. Thanks.

---

After a few delays...

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @SurreyPolice@SurreyPolice the last 12 months for preference. Many thanks.

---

Surrey Police

@SurreyPolice

Replying to @edent@edent Sorry for the delay. We're still processing your request & expect to send a final response within 2 weeks. Will update if any change.

---

I received the answer...

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @DameLynneOwens@CCLynneOwens please can I have a list of your Internet history from your work computer and phone. Consider this an #FoI request. Thanks.

---

Surrey Police

@SurreyPolice

Replying to @edent@edent We apologise for the delay in responding to your request. You can now view the response on our website: surrey.police.uk/About-Us/Your-…

---

You can download the entire report as a PDF. This link no longer works and isn't in the Internet Archive.

A few points to note...

• Fair play, I wasn't expecting them to release this! It does somewhat undermine my argument that the state keeps secret information it desires from its citizens.
• It's a PDF - so not quite open data - but good enough.
• I'm not convinced that the data are entirely accurate. Doesn't seem like a lot of usage - and a suspicious lack of tracking data is reported (although that may well be hidden by their automated reporting tools).
• It's possible to draw some (incorrect) conclusions from the data.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @SurreyPoliceBlimey! Didn't expect @SurreyPolice to answer this FoI for @NCA_LynneOwens' browsing data.
x.com/surreypolice/s… pic.x.com/memipzuevp

---

Jacob Aron

@jjaron

Replying to @edent@edent @SurreyPolice @NCA_LynneOwens Full list includes a primary school website, from which I can infer a fair bit, should have redacted?

---

@jjaron @edent @SurreyPolice I visited it to be interviewed for child's project - so no inference needed. I was looking for directions Tweet from NCA_LynneOwens

The Government want a lot more data that this - and will give it to potentially hundreds of organisations. The risk of your late night browsing sessions leaking remains high.

If you're interested in joining the fight against the Surveillance State, please become a supporter of The Open Rights Group.

This lead on to a session ran by Gaia Marcus on how to create the "perfect" FOI request.

This is not an exhaustive guide to making FOI requests. I strongly suggest that you read WhatDoTheyKnow's recommendations and FOI Man's Top Ten Tips.

To be clear, this isn't going to guarantee that you'll receive an answer - but it should ensure that the answer you get back is useful and conforms to best practices.

Data Format

If you want to interact with the data, you will need it to be supplied in an open and machine readable format. Not PDF!

It makes sense to be explicit as to which format you require the data to be supplied. If, for example, you want geographic data you might want it in KML format. Be aware that most FOI officers are not specialists and will almost certainly supply data in whatever the default format is that their systems export.

The suggested wording of your request should be something like :

Please can you supply these data in an open format such as a CSV file. Section 3 of The Secretary of State's Code of Practice (datasets) issued under Section 45 of the Freedom of Information Act gives more details on acceptable data formats https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/243468/9780108512636.pdf.

For the avoidance of doubt, please do not supply the data in PDF or Microsoft Word format.

Licence

You will often receive data which you cannot make use of due to a restrictive licence. Generally speaking, data provided from a public authority should be under the Open Government Licence. Add this line to the end of your FOI :

I assume that the data provided will be licensed under the Open Government Licence (OGL) as per the guidance from the ICO (https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1151/datasets-foi-guidance.pdf).

Online Publication

Ideally, all FOI data should live online. We shouldn't need to make specific requests to access it. We also want it to be regularly updated. Try including this line in your request :

Please can you publish the data on your website as per the ICO's model publication scheme (https://ico.org.uk/media2/for-organisations/documents/1153/model-publication-scheme.pdf) and supply me with the URL. I would appreciate it if you keep the data updated, with an indication of when and what changes are made. If you are unable to publish online, please send the me the file(s) by return.

Be Polite

Remember, FOI officers are human! They have a stressful and difficult job. Wrapping up your request in boilerplate legal language and being aggressive in your wording is unlikely to win you any friends.

FOI teams can reject "vexatious requests". Be polite, respectful, and as helpful as possible. Don't bombard a department with dozens of similar requests.

These are tips for getting better data - if you have any more, please leave a comment below!

This is proving to be rather tricky - if not impossible.  The  data aren't centrally held and, in any case, polling stations aren't announced until an election is called.

So I went for the next best thing.  Using the wonderful What Do They Know site to make a Freedom of Information Act request, I asked the Electoral Commission for details of every council and which postcodes they cover for elections.

I'm delighted to say that, after a friendly chat with the very helpful Iredia Oboh I now have the data I need!

Check out the nearly finished VOTEUK.

I have a table listing every one of the 17 million postcodes in the UK.  Each postcode has a "Council ID".

I have a table listing every Council with their contact details and their "Council ID".

Using the joy that is MySQL I can take a postcode and find the details of the Council who administer elections in that area.

$query = "SELECT Council_ID from postcode_councilID WHERE postcode = '". $postcode . "'";
$result=mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$council_id = $row["Council_ID"];
$info_query = "SELECT * FROM councils WHERE Council_ID = " . $council_id;
$info_result=mysql_query($info_query);
$info_row = mysql_fetch_array($info_result);

So, I can take W1A 1AA and find that it's administered by Westminster Council, their email address, phone number and postcode.

The data can be found on the FoI request. Note that the CSV files are in UTF-16. You may wish to convert them to UTF-8 or ASCII depending on what you will be doing with the data.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Office 4825 of the British Transport Police refused to show my his ID or Warrant Card when asked. I had been stopped under S.44(2) of The Terrorism Act 2000. The incident happened at around 0854BST on 19/08/2008.

The officer was, I consider, rude and unprofessional. He made a protracted phone call using what appeared to be a private mobile phone (not on the TETRA system) indicating personal information about me and my whereabouts. He would not give me any information about the call.

I have captured the incident on camera and you may view it at politics.phreadz.com/p/15ROH206TI2T/

I would like the following
1) Confirmation that this man is indeed a member of the British Transport Police.
2) Details about whether this man was correct not to show me his identification.
3) Details of the phone call he placed concerning me. Please let me know if I need to submit a separate FOI request for this. [In retrospect, I think I should be asking under the DPA not the FOIA]

Many thanks

Terence Eden

I was impressed with their speed of response. Less than 24 hours.

Mr. Eden

I can confirm that Officer 4825 is a British Transport Police Officer.

If an officer is in plain clothes he is obliged to show identification

In respect of the telephone call that was made, I cannot assist with that.

Regards

William Farrell

PSD Office Manager

It is correct, so I discover from investigation, that uniformed officers don't have to show ID. I think that's a shame. If they've got nothing to hide, they've got nothing to fear.

I really don't think I can be bothered chasing this with the BTP any further. I've stood up to authority and survived. I will continue to write to my MP and keep the money flowing to Liberty.

Many thanks to Cory at Boing Boing for featuring my story. To QIK for providing a streaming service. To Kosso at Phreadz for creating a fantastic video discussion forum. Thanks also for all those who've blogged and digged this (sorry if I missed any). Please keep the comments, tweets and jaikus coming in - it's been fascinating to read both the positive and negative views people have of my actions.

Finally, a huge amount of love and respect to my wife, Liz, for not making me sleep on the sofa last night ;-) She understands me like no one else.

This blog now returns to wittering about QR Codes, mobile phones and Shakespeare.