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In the UK, legislation has also made public sector information increasingly available for transparency and accountability purposes and potentially for social science research. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI), requests for detailed records of what we term consequential data held by public bodies can be made. Unless there is good reason not to, the organization holding the data must provide the information within 20 working days.³² Accepted reasons for refusal include cost, whether the request is vexatious, and if it would prejudice a criminal investigation. The legislation has been widely used to examine transparency in government. Thousands of requests have been made since the introduction of the act, including many in areas that social science research has a track record of examining, such as government decision-making and public spending. Access to this type of data has facilitated research breakthroughs in these areas including, notably: information on MP’s expense claims, records of donations to political parties, extent of care home abuse allegations, detention of children in police cells, links between police forces and commercial companies, police work force demographics and gambling spending levels. However, as reported in Lee (2005), the majority of such requests are not for what might be considered standard social science research purposes. Nevertheless, some examples in the UK context include: local authority data on business cases for new schools (Khadaroo, 2008), Ministry of Defence medical data (Seal, 2006), Department of Health data on drug addiction policy (Mold and Berridge, 2007) and police force crime data (Hutchings et al., 2006). It is notable that as of 2013 new regulations relating to open data rights require data released under FOI requests to be prepared in reusable formats, and that the regulations also allow for the data to be used commercially.³³