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.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
informationrightsandwrongs 
The Tribunal’s distinction between universities (which it says aren’t subject to FOIA) and their governing bodies (which are) is surely wrong? It doesn’t undermine the decision as a whole but it can’t be right.
I’m not sure I follow. If they’re not – strictly – public authorities as defined in FOIA then they can’t be FOIA public authorities. In the same way, strictly, police forces are not public authorities, but their chief officers are.
The corollary of that strict interpretation is that companies wholly owned by universities are not subject to the FOIA 2000. In most cases, the owner of subsidiary companies is the university itself and not the governing body of such university. Furthermore, universities themselves do not act on behalf of governing bodies, so no room for a creative interpretation of s6(2)(b)(ii).
It also means that all ICO DNs and FTT decisions that refer to University of X and not The Governing Body of the University of X are null and void.
Seems really problematic, but I don’t see Parliament fixing this (or caring about the FOIA). How long until universities start using that technicality to stop answering all requests directed to their subsidiaries?
I’ve commented a number of times on the erroneous ICO decision notices which name the wrong (non) public authority. I’m not sure whether they’re a nullity, or whether a court would hold that putting the wrong name was just a slip error that can be corrected.