Send one question with a location, a date and the thing you actually saw, and a UK council owes you an answer on a clock: the Information Commissioner's Office states that a public authority must respond no later than 20 working days after the date it receives an environmental information request (time limits for compliance under the EIR). The condition that changes it: where the volume and complexity make 20 days impracticable, the same ICO page allows an extension to 40 working days, and the authority has to tell you inside the original 20.

Write the observation before you write the opinion

"On Tuesday 15 September the noticeboard at the north entrance carried no opening times" is an observation. "The council is letting the park go" is a conclusion the noticeboard cannot support, and a question built on it invites a defensive reply instead of a document.

Keep two columns on one sheet while you draft. The left column holds what either of you saw, with the date and the exact spot; the right holds what you want to know. One person writes the left and the other the right, then you swap sheets and strike out anything in the left column that is really an inference. What survives is short, and short is what gets answered.

Ask for a document, not for agreement

The strongest question names a paper that either exists or does not. "Where is the current management plan for this park published?" "Which body maintains the north entrance?" "On what date will the monitoring results for this scheme appear, and on which page?"

These sit inside a right, not a favour. The European Commission describes the Aarhus Convention as guaranteeing the public access to environmental information, participation in environmental decision-making and access to justice, implemented in the EU through Directives 2003/4/EC and 2003/35/EC and applied to the EU's own institutions by Regulation (EC) No 1367/2006 (Aarhus). The UK's Environmental Information Regulations 2004 carry the same first pillar into the town hall.

Count the working days on a real calendar

Example. Two neighbours send one question to Bristol City Council, which takes information requests through its own webform or by email to foi@bristol.gov.uk (Freedom of Information). The council receives it on Monday 21 September 2026. Counting from the following day and skipping weekends, with no England bank holiday falling in the window, the twentieth working day is Monday 19 October 2026 — so that is the date to write in the diary, and a note before it is due is a nudge, not a complaint.

One person owns the diary date; the other owns the reply when it comes. Splitting it that way stops a late answer turning into a second, angrier message written by whoever happened to open the inbox.

Read the published record before deciding you were ignored

Bristol City Council publishes its own compliance figures: 652 information requests in January to March 2026 with 90 percent answered inside the statutory deadline, up from 640 requests at 71 percent in April to June 2025 (FOI compliance statistics 2025 to 2026).

Roughly one request in ten missed the statutory deadline in that January to March 2026 quarter (FOI compliance statistics 2025 to 2026). So a silent inbox on day 21 is common enough to chase without drama, and the polite chase quotes the date sent and the 20-working-day limit from the ICO's own page (time limits for compliance under the EIR) rather than asserting a breach. If the question was really about who can reach a green space rather than who maintains it, a greener street for whom frames the observation differently before it becomes an enquiry.

Log what the answer settled

A reply resolves one of three things and rarely all three: who is responsible, what is planned, and what has actually happened. A referral to a parks contractor answers the first and leaves the other two open; a link to a ten-year plan answers the second and says nothing about this September.

Write the sent date, any reference number, which of the three the reply covered, and the one question still standing. That log is what makes a second enquiry short. Chasing what a body does with the answer afterwards is the subject of after a community activity, ask what happened next, and the routes that carry more weight than an enquiry are compared in who gets a say in an environmental decision.

Sources