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UK Freedom of Information Act
A UK public authority has 20 working days to respond, and where it withholds, it must say under which exemption and — for qualified exemptions — why the public interest favours withholding. That second part is what makes UK FOIA a redaction problem with a documentation requirement attached.
Exemption Codes, Shipped
Default code lists ship for UK FOIA alongside US FOIA and the US Privacy Act — 51 codes in total across the three.
Custom lists are created per organisation, which matters in the UK because authorities interpret qualified exemptions differently and an authority needs its own wording to survive its own internal review and an ICO appeal.
The code is drawn onto the redaction itself and appears in the transcript in place of redacted words, so a requester sees both that something was withheld and the basis for it without being sent to a separate schedule.
Welsh
Text regions are classified by script and routed to the engine that reads them, and Welsh is handled on the Latin path. For a public body operating under Welsh language duties, a bilingual document redacts without a separate workflow.
The DWP Deployment
The largest documented deployment is the Department for Work and Pensions: roughly 5,000 users processing 4 million pages a year on a single deployment.
In the procurement that led to it, VIDIZMO scored 86.1%, against Idox plc at 32.8% and ReadyRedact at 30.7%. That is a buyer-run evaluation against UK public-sector requirements rather than a vendor comparison.
Subject Access Is a Different Regime
UK FOIA and a subject access request under UK GDPR are frequently conflated and are not the same obligation, with different clocks and different tests. Where footage contains people other than the requester, the SAR problem is the harder one.
What This Does Not Decide
Which exemption applies, and how the public interest test resolves, are judgements for the authority. Codes record the basis; choosing it remains an operator decision.
FAQ
Questions, answered
How long does a UK public authority have to respond?
Twenty working days. Where it withholds, it must say under which exemption, and for qualified exemptions it must show why the public interest favours withholding.
What makes UK FOIA different from US FOIA?
The public interest test. A qualified exemption is not enough on its own; the authority has to reason on the record why withholding outweighs disclosure, which makes it a documentation requirement as much as a redaction one.
Are UK FOIA exemption codes included?
Yes. UK FOIA codes ship as one of three default groups alongside US FOIA and the US Privacy Act, and custom code lists are definable per organisation.
Can coverage be reported against UK FOIA?
Yes. UK FOIA is one of the twelve frameworks that ship with their own detection class set, so a job run against it reports how much of that set was redacted.
Does the exemption appear on the released file?
Yes. The code is drawn onto the redaction itself and, in audio and transcript redaction, shown in place of the withheld words, so a reader sees that something was withheld and under which basis.