Lotz v Information Commissioner: Tribunal substitutes decision notice on Universal Credit migration algorithm

The First-tier Tribunal has allowed an appeal against an Information Commissioner decision notice concerning the algorithm used to sequence Universal Credit managed migration notices, finding that the Department for Work and Pensions does hold further recorded information within scope, but that the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit.

In Lotz v The Information Commissioner and The Department for Work and Pensions [2026] UKFTT 1014 (GRC), a panel comprising Judge A. Marks CBE, M. Saunders and S. Wolf issued a substitute decision notice in place of IC-348501-M6M3 of 23 May 2025. The decision was given on 9 July 2026. The appellant represented himself. Neither respondent attended or was represented.

The request

On 14 October 2024 the appellant asked the DWP for the mechanism or formula by which the Secretary of State identifies and decides who receives a managed migration notice, and when. He asked what the exact criteria were, who decided them, and whether the process was simply random.

The DWP initially relied on section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, supplying links to published material. That position survived internal review. On complaint, the Commissioner agreed section 21 was not engaged and invited reconsideration. In March 2025 the DWP provided further material, some obtained from HM Revenue and Customs, distinguishing the treatment of tax credit claimants from legacy benefit claimants. The Commissioner concluded that no further recorded information was held on the balance of probabilities and required no steps.

Probing the department

The appellant contended it was improbable that no further recorded information existed explaining how individual claimants were allocated specific termination dates, and that the Commissioner had placed excessive weight on unverified departmental assertions. At the in-person hearing on 20 April 2026 he invited the Tribunal to press the department further.

The panel issued case management directions requiring the DWP to state whether recorded information existed concerning the coding or algorithm used by its Data and Analytics team to create the list of claimants in scope, who created it, the brief they were given, the criteria for weekly selection, and the originators of those criteria. The hearing resumed on the papers on 1 July 2026 with the appellant's explicit consent.

The responses proved significant. The Tribunal found that recorded information is held in some form across each category, distributed among three teams: the Data Enablement Team, responsible for the code producing the list of claimants in scope; the Move to UC Programme Team, responsible for defining selection, deferral and exclusion criteria; and the Working Age Services Dependent Systems Team, responsible for secure data transfer.

The cost limit

Preparing the response to the directions had itself consumed substantial resource. Liaison between the three teams took four hours. Establishing that more than 100 JIRA tickets were linked to the information took fourteen. Locating and reviewing three key documents took four and a half hours, with a further four spent on extraction and collation. Identifying and extracting the Data Enablement code, transforming it into usable format and meeting security requirements was estimated at seventy additional hours. The appellant disputed both the necessity of these tasks and the realism of the estimate.

Against the £600 appropriate limit for central government under regulation 3 of the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, and the £25 hourly rate under regulation 4(4), the ceiling is twenty four hours. The Tribunal found the time already expended was at or beyond that limit, and that even a fraction of the further estimate would exceed it comfortably.

The Tribunal accordingly disagreed with the Commissioner's finding that no further information was held, while concluding that the material could not straightforwardly be extracted or compiled, did not exist in usable format, and would require creation beyond anything the Act obliges. The Commissioner had erred in law in failing to consider section 12. The appeal succeeded, though no further action is required of the department.

Managed migration was completed in December 2025.