- Date released: 22 May 2026
- Request number: EIR202603005
- Release of information under: EIR
Information requested
In 2025 the UK Government set up a Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, which was chaired by John Fingleton, and produced an interim and final report. On 13 March 2026, the UK Government announced its plans to overhaul the regulation of the civil and military nuclear sectors.
Please could the Office for Nuclear Regulation provide copies of any internal correspondence, emails, reports, memos or other recorded information in 2025 and 2026 relating to the Fingleton review and the UK Government's subsequent announcement.
Please note that I am not interested in personal information, purely administrative information, or information that is already in the public domain. I am interested in any substantive unpublished information that discusses the Fingleton review and the government announcement.
If the information I have requested is voluminous or otherwise difficult to extract, I would be happy to discuss ways of reducing the cost.
Our response
We confirm that that we hold the information you have requested, however we are refusing to disclose the information under r.12(4)(b) of the EIR, as the request for information is manifestly unreasonable.
This is because the complexity and volume of information requested would impose an unreasonable burden to deal with the request. In this instance, in line with ICO practice , the burden is considered to be “the cost, including the cost of staff time spent dealing with the request … and the distraction of resources, ie the disruption to the delivery of other services caused by staff having to spend time dealing with the request”.
We have performed a search on our system for the requested information: “copies of any internal correspondence, emails, reports, memos or other recorded information in 2025 and 2026 relating to the Fingleton review and the UK Government's subsequent announcement”, by searching across key related terms and key individuals working on the Fingleton review. From 2025 to 2026 there has been significant involvement in work relating to the Fingleton review across ONR, with at least 28 staff directly involved and many more indirectly involved.
From the search, there were approximately 2800 documents and 40,000 emails, with approximately 30,000 attachments. Taking a conservative assumption that 50% of these items are duplicates, this results in 36,400 items to assess for relevant information and prepare for release. With another conservative assumption that it takes 2 minutes to locate, retrieve, and extract the information from each item, this results in approximately 1213 hours of time, or over 167 working days, to fully process this request.
In other words, in order to process the request within 40 working days, we would need to process each item within 29 seconds. Even with the time extension for the request for the volume and complexity under r.7 to 40 days, it is not reasonable to respond to this request.
This is also far in excess of the 24 hour limit under s.12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which can also provide a comparison for determining whether a request under the EIR is manifestly unreasonable.
Further information
You requested to discuss ways of the reducing the cost of the request. As your request is highly general in its nature, we are unable at this point to advise how you could narrow the request to your benefit. We recommend exploring our news webpage, where much of the outputs of our work relating to the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce can be found.
Please contact us again, quoting the above reference EIR202603005, if you wish to explore how the request could be refined.
If you do wish to submit a refined request, we advise that to bring the request within the appropriate limit, based on the above estimates, it would need to be within a significantly shorter time period, rather than the entirety of 2025 and 2026, along with a more specific topic of interest that is linked to the Fingleton review.
We would like you to note that regardless of whether the request could be refined to a reasonable burden, we would need to consider release of the information further as it is likely that any information in scope falls under r.12(4)(e) : disclosure of internal communications.
Exemptions applied
R.12(4)(b)
Public Interest Test (PIT)
N/A