A council said it didn't hold the data. On review, it sent it.

Same organisation, same question, two opposite answers about what it holds. Nothing changed between the refusal and the disclosure except that somebody pushed back. This one has an outcome, and the outcome is the point.

The refusal

In June we asked a county council in a two-tier area for data on its role in dealing with abandoned vehicles: how many it handled, what it spent, whether it used a contractor, which statutory powers it relied on, and how long cases took.

The reply came back quickly. The council did not hold this information. Abandoned vehicles were a matter for the district and borough councils, and we should approach each of them instead.

That is a familiar answer. We had already written about the pattern it belongs to in the two-tier deflection: two tiers of local government, a genuinely divided responsibility, and a request that falls into the gap between them and never comes out.

What the review produced

We asked for an internal review, the step an authority must offer before a case can go to the Information Commissioner. We set out which part of the duty we believed sat with the county rather than the districts, and asked them to look again.

The following month they answered properly. Yearly volumes for every year they held. Disposal expenditure, to the penny. The name of the contractor, the contract's start and end dates, and confirmation that the cost varies with what is actually collected rather than being a flat annual fee. A list of the statutory powers they operate under, seven of them. A straight answer on whether they hold DVLA partner status.

None of that had to be created. It existed in June, in the same systems, held by the same authority that had said it held nothing.

The two they were right about

Not everything came back. Two of the seven questions were still refused as not held: the average time between a report and a removal, and the number of reported vehicles found to be untaxed or later judged not to be abandoned at all.

On those, the council is right, and it is worth saying so plainly. In this structure the district takes the initial report, inspects the vehicle and tries to trace the owner. The county takes over for disposal. A question about what happens between the report and the inspection genuinely sits on the district side of that line. The redirect there was correct.

Why this is the hard case

The split is real. That is exactly what makes a wrong "not held" so difficult to challenge.

A refusal that points at a genuine boundary sounds reasonable. It uses the right language, names the right other authority, and gives a requester nowhere obvious to object. It only falls apart if you already know which side of that boundary your particular question falls on, and most requesters have no reason to know that.

There is a second thing worth noting here. The council's own account of the split, districts handling the initial stages and the county managing disposal, matches the analysis we published before any of this correspondence happened. That earlier piece worked it out from the statute. This response confirmed it from the inside.

So which was it?

Incompetence, a genuine misreading of where the boundary sits, or the easiest available way to close a file? Thirty years on the other side of this desk and we still cannot tell you which one it was, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

From where the requester sits, it makes no difference. All three produce the same result: no data, unless somebody pushes back.

Most people do not push back. The deadline passes, the request closes, and information that existed the whole time stays unpublished. That is the quiet cost of a wrong refusal, and it does not show up in anybody's compliance statistics.

What to take from it

• A "not held" is a claim, not a fact. It is the authority's assessment of its own holdings, made by whoever picked up the request, and it can simply be wrong.
• Work out where the boundary actually falls before you accept a redirect. Name the specific duty and the tier that carries it, rather than arguing in general terms.
• Ask for the review. It is free, it has a deadline, and in this case it turned a complete refusal into a substantive disclosure.
• Concede the parts they get right. Two of our seven questions really were for the districts. Saying so makes the rest of the challenge harder to dismiss.