BBC News sent Freedom of Information requests to all 151 councils in England with statutory responsibilities to provide school transport for SEND children.

A total of 147 of those came back with responses on spending and 113 came back with responses on demand.

These responses have been supplemented by public data included in council submissions to central government and by analysis carried out by the County Councils Network.

But figures collated by the BBC through Freedom of Information requests, from 29 of the 47 mental health trusts with crisis lines, show that at least 418,000 calls went unanswered in 2021-22.
That means 20% of calls to these trusts weren't answered - with some areas performing far better than others.

The passport application website uses an automated check to detect poor quality photos which do not meet Home Office rules. These include having a neutral expression, a closed mouth and looking straight at the camera.

BBC research found this check to be less accurate on darker-skinned people.

More than 1,000 photographs of politicians from across the world were fed into the online checker.

The results indicated:

Dark-skinned women are told their photos are poor quality 22% of the time, while the figure for light-skinned women is 14%
Dark-skinned men are told their photos are poor quality 15% of the time, while the figure for light-skinned men is 9%

RT @BarnieChoudhury: “What you found out says it all, figures don’t lie.” Sadly further evidence of @BBCNews racism 👇🏽⁦@TVMarv⁩ ⁦@DianeKemp1⁩ ⁦@marcusryder⁩ ⁦@philippachilds⁩ ⁦⁦@paulbradshaw⁩ ⁦⁦⁦@ElonkaSoros⁩

Thirty-four out of 43 police forces responded to a BBC Freedom of Information request asking how many arrests there had been under the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018.

Figures revealed a total of 6,663 arrests between last November and May of this year.

Most grievances (76 per cent) remain in dispute, with 22 cases still pending as of June, according to internal figures disclosed by the BBC in response to a freedom of information request by The Times. Even the seven “resolved” cases could include instances where the complainant has yet to accept a pay increase recommended as a result of the grievance process.
The statistics will fuel concern that the BBC is failing to act quickly enough to address pay inequalities exposed by…

Want to read

Energy ministry's London offices are ruled energy inefficient - BBC News

BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme asked 45 UK police forces, via a Freedom of Information request, if they referred victims and witnesses of crime to the Home Office for immigration enforcement.

Twenty-seven said they did. Some gave a straight "yes", others had caveats such as "not routinely" or "it's rare".

Last March a BBC investigation discovered 37 deaths were linked to skin creams containing paraffin in England since 2010. It is believed there have been a further eight deaths since November 2016.

But fire services are now warning the creams - used for conditions like eczema and psoriasis - may have played a role in many other deaths without investigators realising.

The National Association for RE teachers obtained unpublished official data under Freedom of Information law.

The figures, obtained from the GRO by the BBC in a Freedom of Information request, also show the total number of deaths registered increased by 6% between 2011/12 and 2015/16.

Some 77% of the 311 councils in England, Scotland and Wales that responded had not issued any Community Protection Notices (CPN), which demand owners take steps to prevent attacks.
Hospital admissions from dog attacks have risen by 21% over five years.

Last year Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue extracted an 8ft boa constrictor called Billy from a gas fireplace, while in Darlington two pet rats were rescued from a drainage pipe and a cat was removed from the extractor fan of a pizza shop.

After moving up the people, the number of tenants, into the intro as opposed to the figure of compensation and by making the headline about the consequences of these damp conditions (Unfit council home ‘made my children ill’), the story climbed from an engaged time of just over 30 seconds to over 1 minute 10.

At the end of last year BBC WM BJ Olivia Morley investigated how much money police forces in the West Midlands paid to informants through FOI requests. Olivia tracked down and spoke to former undercover policemen who ran informants, with some saying they were a cheap way of fighting crime and others who described it as a terrible waste of money. Her work caught the idea of producers at Five Live Breakfast and this week Olivia helped them roll the story out across the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38902480

Young people who have grown up in care are far more likely to die in early adulthood than other young people, Freedom of Information figures reveal.
They show 90 people who left care in the UK between 2012 and 2016 died in the years when they would have turned 19, 20 or 21.
Care leavers make up 1% of the population at these ages, but make up around 7% of the deaths.

449 days - 62-year-old patient at Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust
342 days - Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust patient waiting for care home placement
324 days - paralysed patient at Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital awaiting care at home
313 days - stroke patient at Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust. Lack of care meant family or patient unable to cope following discharge
295 days - multiple sclerosis patient at Central Manchester Hospitals NHS Trust waiting for nursing home placement
294 days - patient at Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust waiting for care in own home
288 days - 82-year-old patient at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust
274 days - stroke patient at Central Manchester Hospitals NHS Trust waiting for council care
265 days - epilepsy patient at Central Manchester Hospitals NHS Trust waiting for care package in own home
265 days - patient at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust. No details provided

The FOI disclosure shows "allegations of a criminal nature" were made by Ipsa about the "staffing costs" of two unnamed MPs on February 4 and February 24. They were apparently referred to police the following month.

The cost to local councils of so-called "paupers' funerals" has risen almost 30% to £1.7m in the past four years.
The number of these funerals has also risen by 11%, a Freedom of Information request by BBC Local Radio revealed.

They’re pretty much right, based on figures from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. There’s also data publicly available for England and Wales together—we’ve stuck to the FOI data here just because it’s what the BBC is referring to.

average cost of a cremation at a public crematorium has risen since 2010, according to a BBC Freedom of Information request.
Here is a list of all the local authorities that run crematoriums in the UK - showing their prices for a daytime adult cremation from 2010-11, 2015-16 and the percentage change.

Figures from 125 councils in England and Wales obtained by a Freedom of Information request found a huge range in responses to assessment requests.
On average half of all requests by parents to get help are turned down.

The Home Office Taser database, seen by BBC Radio 5 live, shows a 38% increase on 2012 in the number of children who had a taser aimed at them. Tasers were fired 37 times at 10 to 17-year-olds.

Almost two thirds of BBC programmes aired last year were repeats, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

The request showed that an average of 63% of programmes broadcast across the BBC channels – BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4 – during 2012 had already been aired.

BBC1 trasmitted 2,793 repeat programmes in the period, around a third of its output, while 4,423 BBC2 shows were repeats.

BBC3 was arguably the worst offender with 3,196 (85%) of its programmes coming from repeats while BBC4 had already shown 2,604 hours, or 78% of its output.

Between March 2005 and February 2012 the BBC paid out £276,833,465 in redundancy payments to the 5,992 staff, according to the figures which have been obtained from a freedom of information request.

This makes the average redundancy payment just over £46,200 for each member of staff who took either compulsory or voluntary redundancy from the BBC during that period. Some of the redundancy payouts include extra money paid in lieu of holiday owed to staff.

The highest individual redundancy payment was £949,000, according to the BBC response to the FOI request. The BBC gave details of the 20 biggest redundancy payments during the period, but declined to name the staff or to give their job titles.

However, £949,000 was the same amount given for "compensation for loss of office" to BBC deputy director general Mark Byford, who left in June last year, according to page 61 of the corporation's 2010/2011 annual report.

The Manchester figures show that 1% of applications were successful and the figure for the north as a whole is just a 0.85% success rate.

This compares to a London post codes total of 2.29% and in one of the capital's areas, West London, more than 4% of applicants landed jobs.

Explanatory notes accompanying the data provide more detail – the figure of those hired includes people appointed outside of the online jobs bank. It explains:

"The postcode data for posts filled relates to two categories of people: those who were successfully appointed following speculative application through the jobs bank plus those who were successfully appointed through application to externally advertised specific roles."