Even Sunday Brought Another Section 31 Extension

By now, Section 31 was no longer an isolated feature of the project.

Today, British Transport Police joined the growing list.

BTP told us that it had not yet reached a decision on where the public interest lay and would need another 20 days before providing a substantive response. Its revised target date was 16 October 2026.

The exemption identified was, once again:

Section 31 — Law Enforcement.

The notice did not explain which of our six questions was affected, which specific subsection of Section 31 was being relied upon, or what prejudice disclosure was thought capable of causing.

So we asked.

Our response was deliberately narrow. We were not asking BTP to finish the public-interest test early. We simply asked for the basic information needed to understand the exemption already being considered: the relevant subsection, the affected parts of the request, and the broad nature of the law-enforcement concern.

By this point, the exercise was becoming strangely repetitive.

The original FOI had been designed to test evidence behind safeguards: deletion records, audits, assurance, incident figures, governance and supplier arrangements.

We had deliberately excluded operational intelligence and genuinely sensitive technical information.

Yet, force after force was now treating at least some part of the request as potentially engaging law-enforcement prejudice.

Tomorrow was the main deadline day for most of the project.

And by Sunday evening, the direction of travel was already becoming clear.

The unanswered question was no longer simply: Will the forces respond?

It was becoming: How many of them will respond by invoking Section 31?

We were about to find out.