On 2 July last year, the Local Government Association published a report on the future of home to school transport. It predicted spending by councils was going to ‘soar’ and would reach nearly £2 billion by the end of 25/26.

The report recommended scrapping the current statutory right to transport based on SEN/disability and instead introducing a ‘simple binary distance criterion’ (3 miles) for everyone, including children with SEN and/or disabilities. It would be left to ‘local discretion to ensure that there is sufficient support for those who face the most significant challenges in getting their children to school’.

We set out our concerns about the proposals in an article here.

The report said that savings of 15 percent could be made if these new eligibility criteria were adopted, based on modelling by two local authorities, one urban and one rural.

We wanted to know how many children would be affected, and whether children with SEND would be disproportionately affected, because this information is not provided in the report. We asked for the modelling data, or if the LGA did not have that, the names of the two local authorities.

The LGA refused to tell us. It did not have the data, and the local authorities concerned had a right to confidence. It said: ‘releasing the names may cause a detriment to the local authorities involved by putting an unhelpful and misleading spin on the information they provided’ and ‘there is a legitimate concern that there is a lot of potential for messages to become distorted and for the individual local authorities to come under a lot of pressure.’

We appealed this decision to the Information Commissioner, and last week he agreed with us, saying “There is a strong public interest in understanding the evidential basis for proposals intended to inform national policy debate. Identifying the authorities involved would permit scrutiny of the context in which the modelling was undertaken and would assist public understanding of the weight that should be attached to the conclusions drawn.”

We are pleased that the ICO has recognised how important it is that the public fully understand the LGA proposals, and we are equally disappointed that the LGA did not come to this conclusion by itself.

The decision by the ICO is here.

The LGA has 30 days to provide us with the names of the two authorities.