As a more general comment on the situation, it seems to me that the whole business of "flight information" (FIS) is a strange concept, which becomes largely unworkable when there is a significant amount of traffic.
I believe the concept of "FIS" dates back to the beginning of ICAO in the 1940s. Aircraft should be able to receive "flight information" in a prescribed manner - this makes sense.
When you fly across say Greece, you are probably one of about 3 VFR planes in the whole of Greek airspace at that moment. So an FIS makes sense, and sure enough they will keep on top of you. They will want you on the VOR-VOR airways (e.g. A14) and they will ask for your ETA to the next WP. There's not a lot of random non-radio bimbling in this place.
But in the UK, on any nice day, there are hundreds of planes in the air. An FIS is meaningless. They are prevented from passing avoidance suggestions (though they sometimes do). The UK FIS controllers - unusually for Europe, I think - don't usually have radar screens; London Info is
AFAIK a man sitting at a desk, presumably with the little bits of paper in front of him.
And if they have radar they evidently aren't allowed to refer to it for the purposes of the service provision - e.g. I can fly in the Solent area and I am sure the man has a radar (because if I asked for an RIS he would use it) but he still asks me for position reports. It would surely be easier for him to give me a squawk and then
everybody has less work to do
So FIS is of minimal value - except for training PPL students to use the radio.
I know for a fact that most experienced pilots don't use FIS; and if everybody called up London Info the service would collapse immediately so I am sure they are quietly thankful.
FIS and RIS should be merged into one service. In France, FIS is all you can get under VFR and they pass you traffic if it gets close enough. They can do this quite usefully because there is so little traffic over there.
I would suspect they don't want to do that in the UK because, in heavy traffic, the FISO would find it hard to offer a service to some and not others, and nobody wants to pay for more desks.
Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't see the point in passing the full prescribed inside leg measurement to the FISO, just so he can write it on a piece of paper. Search/Rescue purposes aside, it doesn't seem to benefit anybody.