The Waiting Room

You are entitled to ask the government for information, and it has 20 working days to answer. This is how long that actually takes, agency by agency, from the government's own compliance statistics. 959,685 requests since 2015.

Finding 01

The system got worse, then partly recovered

Share of requests answered within the legal deadline, each six-month period. Late 2023 was the worst on record: more than one request in five missed the deadline. Bars are red where on-time performance fell below 90%.

Finding 02

Take a number

Every agency handling 20 or more requests in the latest period, worst first. Click a ticket for its full record: median wait, extensions, refusals, Ombudsman complaints, and how it has tracked since 2015.

Source. Official OIA statistics published by Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, six-monthly since 2015. This is the government's own reporting on itself, not a scrape and not a sample: it covers every request handled by the agencies in the collection.
Cleaning. Rows typed “Agency Type Totals” are sector aggregates and are removed; left in, they double every national figure. The first two collections were annual and appear duplicated across two half-year rows, so those duplicates are dropped. Macrons are absent from the published file, having been replaced with question marks at source, and are restored here from an explicit list rather than guessed.
Caveats. Request volumes roughly triple in 2019 because New Zealand Police joined the collection with 42,351 requests in one period. That is a change in what gets counted, not a surge in demand. Median response times were not collected before 2022. Agencies self-report, and “on time” includes requests where the agency extended its own deadline. Rankings need 20 or more requests in the period.

Adventures in Comms, 04 Notes · willedmonds.com The Lab