We wrote about the two-tier deflection. Then we watched it happen.

Our first Field Notes piece described a pattern we see often: two councils pointing at each other until a request quietly dies. Weeks later, on a live campaign, we watched almost exactly that scenario play out, with an extra twist: the council's own website contradicted its own refusal.

What we asked for, and what came back

We asked a district council in a two-tier county for data on its abandoned-vehicle function: how many reports it receives, what action it takes, what it costs. The reply said the council doesn't hold this information, that it's a county-level function, and redirected us to the county council instead.

We'd seen this exact split before. Removing an abandoned vehicle from land or a road is a district or borough duty under section 3(1) of the Refuse Disposal (Amenity) Act 1978, not a county one. So before accepting the redirect, we checked the district council's own website.

The council's own website, in its own words

The council runs a dedicated page telling residents how to report an abandoned vehicle. It opens by stating, in the council's own words, that it is responsible for removing abandoned vehicles from land and roads, including private land. The page goes on to describe the council's own process in detail: an inspection within one day of a report, photographic evidence, a Notice of Removal attached to the windscreen, and arrangements for removal if no owner comes forward.

That is not the language of an authority with no involvement in the function. It is a service the council operates, publishes, and takes reports for through its own reporting system. A “we don’t hold this” answer sitting next to that page does not add up.

The ping-pong, confirmed

It got more interesting. The county council had already answered an identical request from someone else, on record, stating that abandoned vehicles are a district and borough function and redirecting that requester back to the district. Both authorities were pointing at each other, and both cannot be right.

This is exactly the pattern we wrote about in our earlier piece on the two-tier deflection: a real duty split, used as a place to deflect a request, whether or not that's the intention. Seeing it happen with both councils' actual replies on the table, rather than as a general description, made the pattern impossible to miss.

What we did

We requested an internal review, the step a public authority has to offer before a case can go to the Information Commissioner. The review sets out the statutory duty, quotes the council's own website back to it, and notes that the county's own reply points the other way. Under section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an authority has to be satisfied that it genuinely doesn't hold information before it can refuse on those grounds, and we don't think that threshold was met here.

• Read the authority's own website before accepting “not held.” A published service page, written in the authority's own words, is hard to square with a claim that it holds nothing on the subject.
• Check what the other authority already said. If two bodies have answered similar requests and pointed in opposite directions, that's evidence, not just an inconvenience.
• Cite the statute, not just the disagreement. Naming the specific duty and the section it sits under turns “I think you're wrong” into something a reviewing officer has to actually engage with.
• Keep the review on the clock. Twenty working days, the same as the original request, counting from the day the review is requested.