For those interested in the general question of what is a “publicly owned company” for the purposes of sections 3 and 6 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), and the specific question of whether the Russell Group is a public authority for the purposes of the FOIA, the Information Tribunal judgment in Farfan v Information Commissioner & Anor [2026] UKFTT 48 (GRC) will make fascinating reading. For the remaining 69.2 million people in the UK, it will be impenetrable.
A company will be a publicly owned company for the purposes of section 3(1)(b) of FOIA if all of its members are themselves public authorities listed in schedule 1 of FOIA.
So, in short, the answer to the second question is “no”, because a) 22 of the 24 members of the Russell Group are university institutions, not the governing bodies of those institutions (and it is the latter which are listed in schedule 1), b) in any case, even if the Tribunal had decided that there was no distinction between the university institutions and their governing bodies, the remaining two members of the Russell Group are the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and they are not listed in schedule 1 of FOIA (rather, they are public authorities for the purposes of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002).
Get reading, you crazy FOIA (and FOISA) nerds.
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