Bristol City Council In Court

I have been looking at information related to Bristol City Council and legal actions they have been involved in.

I have now added a new set of reports to Bristol Uncovered (look for "The Law" button) to see the three new reports.

Local Government Ombudsman Decisions

This report contains details of decisions related to Bristol City Council.

About 30% of Decisions are Upheld (that means BCC lost).

81% of SEND related decisions are upheld.

68% of Homelessness decisions are upheld.

A few SEND related decisions from 2025:

And some Homelessness related decisions:

ICO Notices

These are related to Freedom of Information requests. If someone believes their request has not been dealt with properly, they can ask the Information Commissioner Office (ICO) to take a look. My report includes data for all Local Authorities so that I can compare the performance of Bristol City Council with other Local Authorities.

Looking at all of the ICO Notices since 2005 you can see that Bristol City Council has the second highest number of ICO notices. 38% of these are upheld.

The details for Bristol City Council shows that the peak for "Upheld" cases was in 2022 and 2023.

Here is an example of a recent ICO Notice:

Case Law

There are cases where Bristol City Council is involved, or are mentioned somewhere in the case report.

The most recent case is an appeal by BCC against action taken by the ICO due to the poor performance of BCC for Freedom of Information requets.

The Council appealed against the enforcement notice where the ICO effectively told the Council to "pull your finger out and deal with your FOI Requests".

The Council have spent a couple of years appealing against this enforcement notice. Perhaps they should have spent the money on employing a few more people to deal with FOI requests.