Subject Access Request to Social Services

This is the part people get wrong, and it costs a month. Social services is not a national service and there is no central office to write to. The organisation that provided the care holds the record, and it is its own data controller.

• England — and not just any council. Section 1 of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970 names the councils that count: non-metropolitan counties and metropolitan districts, the London boroughs, and the Common Council of the City of London. What is not on that list is a district or borough council sitting inside a county area. So if you have two councils — one for bins and housing, one for everything else — social services belongs to the county, and a request to the district goes nowhere useful. Where your area has a single unitary council, it does both jobs. (The Isles of Scilly get their own line in the Data Protection Act, which tells you how carefully this was drafted.)
• Wales and Scotland. The council, in both cases. Welsh councils exercise social services functions under the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 and Scottish councils under the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 — the Data Protection Act names all three regimes in the same paragraph, which is the tidiest single source for who holds what across Great Britain.
• Northern Ireland — not a council. Health and social care are one service there, so social care records sit with a health and social care trust, which nidirect lists with contact details. The same paragraph of the Data Protection Act gives HSC trusts their own limb for exactly this reason. Writing to a Northern Irish council for a care file is the single most common wrong turn on this subject.
• If you moved, or the council was reorganised. The record follows the authority that held it, which may no longer exist under that name. Ask the council that covers the area now — it will either hold the file or know who inherited it. Statutory guidance is explicit that where records have been transferred, the authority should put you in touch with whoever has them.

GOV.UK’s postcode finder covers England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and will give you the council’s own website. Look on it for “data protection”, “subject access request” or “access to records” rather than for a social services phone number: requests go to an information governance team, not to the social work office.

Health records are a separate request to a separate organisation even where the same events are described in both. If you need those as well, how to get your medical records covers the three routes to a health record, and which NHS organisation holds your records works out the trust, practice or board. Where the police were involved — a child protection referral, a domestic abuse report, a missing episode — that force holds its own separate file, and which police record you need explains which of them to ask.

Say which service and which years. A council holds children’s social care, adult social care, housing, homelessness, council tax, benefits, education and complaints in departments that do not talk to each other, and a request for “everything you have” is routed to one of them and answered narrowly. Naming the service, the approximate dates, the names you were known by and any reference number you have is worth more here than in almost any other kind of request.

Ask for the whole file, not the summary. A social care file is assessments, case notes, minutes of meetings, plans, reviews, correspondence, referrals from other agencies, and reports written for panels or for court. If you want the contact log or the supervision notes, say so — an organisation only has to carry out a reasonable and proportionate search, not an exhaustive one.

It is free. There is normally no fee. A reasonable fee may only be charged where a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive, or where you ask for further copies. The Information Commissioner’s Office says the same thing specifically for social work information.

How long they have. An organisation must respond without undue delay and within one month. It may extend by up to two further months where the request is complex or you have made a number of requests, but it must tell you within the first month that it is doing so, and why. Social care files are among the requests most likely to be extended, because they are long, they are about several people at once, and somebody has to read every page before it goes out.

Identification. An organisation may ask you to verify your identity, but only where it has reasonable doubts about who you are, and it should ask for the minimum needed. Where it needs further information to deal with your request, the one-month clock pauses until you provide it. If the team already knows who you are, statutory guidance for care leavers says formal identification should not be needed at all.

You do not need anything from us to do this. Our free subject access request template gives you wording you can send to a council today, and what to do if a request is refused, ignored or heavily redacted covers the step most people need next. If you would rather hand the whole thing over, how GetMySAR works explains what we do at each stage before you pay anything.

Almost every article on this subject treats a care leaver’s request as an ordinary subject access request. It is not. The Department for Education’s statutory guidance on the transition to adulthood for care leavers devotes a chapter to access to records, and it binds councils in England: it is issued under section 7 of the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970, which means a council has to follow it unless local circumstances give an exceptional reason not to.

GOV.UK describes the document as guidance about care leavers aged 16 and 17, which badly undersells this chapter. The guidance says in terms that because a child’s case record has to be kept until their 75th birthday, the same principles should apply to a care leaver of any age.

• Your file still exists, and for a long time. Regulation 50 of the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010 requires the responsible authority to keep the case record until the 75th anniversary of the child’s birth — or, if they died before turning 18, for fifteen years from the date of death. If you are told your records are gone, that is a statement about that authority’s record-keeping, not about what the law expected of it.
• Ten working days to confirm the file exists. Separately from the one-month deadline for the records themselves, the guidance says an acknowledgement should be sent within ten working days confirming that records exist — and that if the authority already knows they do not, it should say so immediately rather than let you wait.
• Ask to talk to them before they start redacting. This is the most useful sentence on this page. The guidance tells the case worker to contact you by phone or in person after the request, partly to explain the process and partly to establish what you already know about your family and history — expressly so that no unnecessary redactions are made about people you already know about. Redaction of third-party information is the single biggest reason care files come back unreadable. You can ask for that conversation, and you can ask for it early.
• The file should arrive in a usable state. The guidance says records provided should be legible, coherent and well-ordered, and should let you understand your family background, why you came into care and what happened while you were there. Where things are redacted, you should be given clear explanations of why.
• Support is part of the service. Councils are expected to publicise their access-to-records policy, to have trained staff handle these requests, to offer to speak to you after you have read the file, and to help you locate family members or point you to a tracing or intermediary service.
• If the records have been lost or destroyed. The guidance recognises how much distress this causes and tells authorities to say so promptly, to explain what searches they will make and how long that will take, and to help you find other records that might answer the same questions — health and education records among them.
• Descendants. The guidance says councils should respond to requests from a direct descendant of a care leaver who is seeking information about family history. That is not a data protection right — it is an expectation of good practice — but it is written down, and it is worth quoting if you are the child or grandchild of someone who was in care.

This guidance applies to England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own care-leaver frameworks which this page does not attempt to summarise; the data protection right of access is the same everywhere in the UK, and it is the extra support around it that differs.

Adoption records are held by an adoption agency — usually a council’s adoption service or a voluntary agency — and access to them is governed by the Adoption and Children Act 2002 rather than by ordinary data protection law. Sending a subject access request gets you less than the adoption route does, and takes longer to find that out.

• You have a statutory right to your birth record, and it is not a data protection right. Section 60(2) of the Act gives an adopted person aged 18 or over the right to receive from the appropriate adoption agency the information that would let them obtain a certified copy of the record of their birth, unless the High Court or family court orders otherwise in exceptional circumstances. Section 60(4) adds a right to prescribed documents from the court that made the adoption order.
• But identifying information about other people is locked down. Section 57 makes information held by an adoption agency that identifies the adopted person or anyone else “protected information”, disclosable only through that Act’s own procedure. A subject access request does not open that door, and section 60(5) keeps protected information out of the court documents too.
• Where to start. GOV.UK’s guide to adoption records covers all three routes: ordering your original birth certificate from the General Register Office if you know your birth details, the Birth certificate Information Before Adoption application if you do not, the Adoption Contact Register, and approved intermediary agencies for tracing a birth relative. Note one date on it: if you were adopted before 12 November 1975 and do not know your birth details, you have to attend a counselling session with an approved adoption adviser first.
• Your care file is a separate question. If you were in local authority care before being adopted, the children’s services file about that period is a council record and a subject access request reaches it in the ordinary way. It is the adoption agency’s file, and anything identifying birth relatives, that the 2002 Act controls.

Social work information gets its own part of the Data Protection Act — Schedule 3, Part 3 — on top of every restriction that applies to ordinary records. Four things routinely reduce what you get, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at, because they are challengeable to very different degrees.

• Other people’s information. This is the big one, and it is unavoidable: a care file is written by several professionals about several people, so it is full of information about parents, siblings, foster carers and people who made referrals. The ordinary third-party rules apply and a great deal gets removed. One useful counterweight from the ICO: it is normally reasonable to disclose information identifying a professional, such as a social worker, who was carrying out their duties. If a name has been blacked out and it belonged to a social worker acting in their job, that is worth querying.
• The serious harm test. A council is exempt from the right of access to the extent that complying would be likely to prejudice the carrying out of social work, because it would be likely to cause serious harm to the physical or mental health of you or of anyone else. That is a high bar tied to specific information — it is not a reason to refuse a file as a whole.
• Material that went to a court. Where information was supplied in a report or given as evidence in proceedings under one of eight named sets of court rules — the Family Procedure Rules 2010 among them — and those rules let the court withhold it, it is exempt. In practice this is what removes the court bundle from a file about care proceedings. The council’s own case records about the same events are a different thing and are not automatically covered.
• A parent asking for a child’s file hits an extra restriction. Where someone with parental responsibility asks for the records of a person under 18 — under 16 in Scotland — or a court-appointed deputy asks for those of someone unable to manage their own affairs, the council must withhold anything the person gave in the expectation that it would not be passed to the requester, anything they consented to give in an examination or investigation on that understanding, and anything they have said should not be disclosed this way. It falls away only if the person says they no longer hold that expectation.

Scotland has a restriction of its own that nowhere else does. Where the information came from the Principal Reporter in the course of their statutory duties and you are not entitled to receive it from the Principal Reporter, the council cannot disclose it in answer to a subject access request, and it has to notify the Principal Reporter within 14 days of the question arising. The ICO’s guidance on social work information sets out all of these, and the underlying provisions are in Part 3 of Schedule 3 to the Data Protection Act 2018.

A subject access request is not disclosure in ongoing proceedings. If care proceedings are live, the documents in the case are handled through the court process and through your solicitor, and a subject access request runs alongside that rather than instead of it. It also does not get anyone’s decision reviewed — it gets you the records.

• An adult who has agreed. A solicitor, advocate, family member or friend can make the request with evidence that the person agreed — normally a signed consent form. The records are theirs, so they decide.
• An adult who lacks capacity. A registered lasting power of attorney, a deputy appointed by the Court of Protection, or evidence that you are acting in the person’s best interests. Note the restriction above: a court-appointed deputy asking for social work information will not be given things the person said should stay private.
• A child. A young person can exercise their own rights once they understand them, and where they can, a parent generally needs their agreement. A person with parental responsibility can otherwise make the request in the child’s best interests, subject to the expectations restriction above. Scotland sets the line differently: the social work restriction refers to a person under 16 there, against under 18 elsewhere in the UK.
• Someone who has died — and this is the gap on this subject. Data protection rights end at death, so there is no subject access request. Health records of a person who has died have their own statute, the Access to Health Records Act 1990 — social care records do not. NHS England’s position is that a personal representative should be given access as a matter of good practice on the same basis as under that Act, but anyone else needs the personal representative’s written permission or a court order, and there is no statutory deadline for a reply. Our page on medical records sets out the 1990 Act route in full, including who can apply and why the Information Commissioner cannot help with it. Our own form does not accept requests about people who have died.

Two different regulators sit behind this, and people routinely go to the wrong one. The split is clean once you see it: the Information Commissioner polices the request, the ombudsman polices the service.

• About the request itself — the Information Commissioner’s Office. Complain to the organisation first. Since 19 June 2026 every organisation has had a legal duty to give you a clear way to raise a data protection complaint, to acknowledge it within 30 days, to look into it properly and to tell you the outcome. If it does not, or the answer is incomplete, you can then complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. No response, a late response, an unexplained refusal, or redaction you think goes beyond what the law allows are all data protection complaints. Statutory guidance tells councils to make sure care leavers know the ICO exists and what it can do.
• About how you were treated — the ombudsman for your nation. In England the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman is free and looks at complaints about council services and about privately funded adult social care. Complain to the council first — it will not look at anything until you have, and it expects a response within about sixteen weeks, longer for children’s services because those complaints follow a multi-stage process set out in law. It normally will not look at something more than twelve months after you first knew about it, or at anything where you are already taking legal action. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own public services ombudsman.

If something in the file is factually wrong, that is a rectification request rather than an access request, and it is a separate letter. Where a professional disagrees that an entry is wrong, your account can normally be recorded alongside it rather than the entry being changed.

• A copy of the council’s policy or procedure. That is information about the council rather than about you, so it is a Freedom of Information request, a different law with different tests and a different deadline. You can make both.
• Getting a decision changed. A refused care package, a disputed assessment, a child protection plan you disagree with: those go through the council’s complaints procedure, and then the ombudsman. A subject access request gets you the paperwork behind the decision, which is often what makes the complaint work, but it is not the complaint.
• Your medical records. Held by a GP practice, hospital trust or health board, not by the council, even where the same events appear in both files. Getting your medical records is the separate route.
• A criminal record check. A social care file is not a certificate. If an employer has asked for a check, that is a Disclosure and Barring Service, Disclosure Scotland or AccessNI application — which police record you need explains which one and why a subject access request is not a substitute.