- Date released: 29 June 2026
- Request number: EIR202606006
- Release of information under: EIR
Information requested
Thank you for your response to my freedom of information request reference EIR202603005.
As you suggest, I would like to try and refine my request to reduce the cost. I previously requested "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.”
Would it help if I amended this as follows?
Please could ONR provide copies of any correspondence between the senior management team about potential issues relating to the Fingleton review in the six months to the 13 March 2026 when the UK Government announced its plans to overhaul the regulation of the civil and military nuclear sectors.
As before, 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 discussions between senior managers about the review.
Our response
We confirm that that we hold the information you have requested, however our position remains the same and 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 upon ONR to deal with the request.
In this particular 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”
In determining the burden, we performed a search on our systems for copies of any correspondence between the senior management team about potential issues relating to the Fingleton review in the six months to the 13 March 2026.
We concluded the scope of the search should relate to information shared between ONR’s Senior Leadership Team members only that were in post in the period of the 13 September 2025 - 13 March 2026.
By searching across key related terms and these key individuals working on the Fingleton review, we identified 9,748 items or 6.6 GB of information. This included items such as emails, calendar appointments and documents shared.
There were approximately 1,000 documents and 7,400 emails identified. Taking a conservative assumption that 50% of these items are duplicates, this results in 4,200 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 140 hours of time, therefore it is not reasonable to fully process 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
As per our previous response, and 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 Review 2025 can be found.
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 the exception r.12(4)(e) disclosure of internal communications and thus unlikely to be released.
If however you do still wish to refine your request, please contact us again, quoting the above reference EIR202606006. 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, along with a more specific topic of interest that is linked to the Nuclear Regulatory Review 2025.
Exemptions applied
- Regulation 12(4)(b)
Public Interest Test (PIT)
N/A