What could AI-assisted FOI drafting return for your organisation?

Two figures is all it takes. Set how many Freedom of Information requests you receive each year and how long one takes your team today.

£0

Estimated annual savingStaff handling time released plus escalation costs avoided on requests that would have missed the statutory deadline, with the annual licence already deducted. Implementation is charged separately.

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Staff hours freed a yearEnd-to-end handling time returned across every request: logging, triage, research, drafting and filing.
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Full-time officers of capacityThe hours freed expressed as full-time posts, at 1,924 working hours a year. Capacity to redeploy, not roles to cut.
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Late responses avoidedRequests brought back inside the 20-working-day statutory deadline, through deadline alerts, auto-triage and a drafted response waiting for review.
Where the cost sits today, and after

Total annual saving

£0

Staff handling time released plus escalation costs avoided, with the annual licence already deducted. Implementation is charged separately.

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A one-page PDF built on the figures above, ready to forward to a senior sponsor or drop into a business case.

  • Your handling cost before and after, net of what the agent costs
  • Officer hours and capacity returned, and late responses avoided
  • Every benchmark and source behind the estimate

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How this is worked out

Three things change. Proactive publication and self-service take 20% of requests out of the queue before an officer sees them. Auto-triage, routing and drafted responses remove 42% of the handling time on the requests that remain. Deadline alerts and a draft waiting for review cut late responses by 60%. Released time is valued at £30 an hour, being a mid-band officer salary with pension and employer national insurance. Each late response carries £150 of management time, internal review and ICO correspondence. The chart compares operating cost before and after. The total annual saving beneath it, and the headline figure, both have the cost of the agent deducted.

The statutory deadline is 20 working days under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The ICO does not levy financial penalties for late responses; enforcement runs through Decision Notices, Enforcement Notices and Practice Recommendations, so the escalation figure here covers internal cost rather than fines. A planning estimate, not a quotation. Retention and reputational effects are excluded. For figures built on your own officer costs and request mix, speak to our team.

The cost of the agent is the published rate in the FOI Pricing Document, G-Cloud 14 Lot 2, dated 2 May 2024. A base standing charge of £2,000 a month covers the service, and a volume band sits on top of it: £500 a month up to 100 requests a month, £1,000 up to 200 and £1,300 up to 400. Those come to £30,000, £36,000 or £39,600 a year. The saving steps down where your volume crosses a band boundary, because the licence moves up to the next band while the saving carries on rising at the same rate. Implementation is not included and is charged separately at Agilisys SFIA rates. The minimum contract term is twelve months. Anything above 400 requests a month, or a full database integration, is costed against your own requirements.

The 42% is measured rather than assumed. An efficiency assessment on real FOI cases, verified by an information governance team using our product, recorded a 42% fall in effort on the average case and a 53% fall in overall processing effort. This model lands on 54% once the deflected requests are counted alongside the time saved on the rest, so the two corroborate each other. The 20% deflection and the 60% improvement in on-time compliance remain planning assumptions. The gain in that assessment was absorbing rising FOI demand without adding resource, not freeing surplus capacity.