1. TICTeC keynote speaker announcement: María Baron

    We’re excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our 2024 Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC)!

    Join us on 12 and 13 June  — in London or online — and you’ll hear from María Baron, founder and now Global Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo.

    This year, one of the major themes at TICTeC will be the role of civic tech in safeguarding and advancing democracy where it is under threat. María and Directorio Legislativo’s work explore both  the problem, and how we can collectively roll up our sleeves and do something about it. 

    María has a long career in transparency and democratic institutions, working first across Latin America and then globally with both Directorio Legislativo and the Open Government Partnership. Along the way, María also founded the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency, convening 24 civil society organisations from 13 countries. 

    With her team at Directorio, María developed a methodology for building consensus across polarised stakeholders on tricky issues — and has brought many of those agreements to Congress, where they were signed into law.

    The Regulatory Alert Service, also from her Directorio team, enables political analysts to predict changes in regulation across 19 countries. 

    Among many other achievements, María has been awarded the NDI Democracy Award for Civic Innovation. In short, we can guarantee you’ll gain a massive dose of inspiration and hope from her session.

    And that’s just the first speaker announcement from this year’s TICTeC. Make sure you’re a part of the “best concentration of practitioners, academics, and thinkers in this field” (Fran Perrin, Indigo Trust) and book your place now.

    It’s been a while since we convened the wonderful, industrious, inspiring global civic tech community in one place, face to face — we’re ready to reignite those amazing conversations, connections and deep dives into democracy at the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, this June. 

    BOOK YOUR PLACE AT TICTeC NOW

  2. “Don’t be afraid to copy” and four more highlights from the Scorecards Successes Conference

    To reach the UK’s 2050 net zero target, all local authorities need to take serious action across all of their operations. But what exactly should they do, and in what order?

    To get the most out of the brilliant data uncovered by the Council Climate Action Scorecards, Climate Emergency UK commissioned Anthesis to research and write a report digging into the characteristics that were associated with high marks. This allows campaigners and officers alike to go to their councils and say: “Start here. These are the most effective actions to drive up our scores, and reduce our carbon footprint.”

    The Scorecards Successes report is available to read now, and it was an absolute pleasure to join councillors, campaigners and others in the climate sector yesterday for a really encouraging conference to celebrate its launch.

    Here are five things I took away:

    1. Good governance generates great scores

    As you can see from the table above, appointing a climate portfolio holder is the most impactful characteristic for high scores in the Council Climate Action Scorecards. I loved the way Matt Babic from Anthesis (authors of the report) described effective governance as a T-shape, with the downstroke representing depth of knowledge within a climate team, and the across stroke representing good communication and distribution of responsibility across the council as a whole. For campaigners out there, this might be a good way to start a conversation with your local council  — how effective  is your council’s climate ‘T’ in depth and breadth? 

    2. Funding reform is vital

    The report recognises that since 2019, councils have spent more than £130 million applying for short term competitive funded pots; time and money that is wasted if they are unsuccessful. This came up time and again throughout the day, and there was consensus across the room. In order for councils to be able to deliver at the pace and scale necessary, national government needs to unlock these barriers to funding and enable clearer, simpler financial mechanisms, which must also facilitate necessary private sector investment. 

    3. Devolution deals need simplifying if they’re going to support better climate action

    One surprising finding from the report is that authorities that are members of Combined Authorities score lower on the whole than those that are not. This paints a mixed picture for the successes of devolution deals in delivering across their constituent councils. In the final panel of the day, Sandra Bell from Friends of the Earth and co-chair of the Blueprint Coalition, gave some excellent food for thought about the future of devolution deals across the UK. The UK government has promised devolution deals “everywhere” by 2030, which is also the date by which many UK councils have committed to reach net zero. We still lack clarity on the exact form and shape of the deals yet to come, and with a very mixed picture of multiple types and styles of devolution settlements currently in operation, the Blueprint Coalition are calling for clarity, simplicity and scaled up funding to help this new layer of governance really deliver. 

    4. Transparency and public engagement aren’t the same thing, but they’re both needed 

    At mySociety, we care a lot about transparency, and we’re always asking for better data publication to enable it. Better data publication from local authorities would enable us to make useful climate data more accessible to those who want to dig into it. But publishing data and engaging the public aren’t entirely the same thing. In addition to transparency, councils should be actively delivering public engagement exercises that tackle  the more holistic questions and future decision-making, about how to make the road to net zero a fair one. It was great to hear Cllr Anna Railton talk about Oxford City Council’s residents panel – a great forum for these conversations, and markedly cheaper than a citizens’ assembly. Transparency and public engagement are related, but not the same, and we need both.

    5. “Don’t be afraid to copy”

    Rob Robinson from Kent County Council made the point that I think underpins a lot of why we think the Scorecards are so helpful. Every council in the UK is working towards net zero, be that to their own target or the UK’s 2050 target, but they don’t have to do it alone. In every section there are high scoring councils, and the evidence of the brilliant policies they’ve implemented are easily discoverable on the site. Let’s not reinvent the wheel: this isn’t an exam, as Rob says —  don’t be afraid to copy.

  3. Creating datasets from FOI data

    Responses obtained from a widespread FOI project can be difficult to analyse, until they are sorted into neat datasets. This allows you to make valid comparisons, pull out accurate statistics and ultimately ensure your findings are meaningful.

    In our third seminar within the Using Freedom of Information for Campaigning and Advocacy series, we heard from two speakers. Maya Esslemont from After Exploitation explained how to prepare for an FOI project to ensure you get the best results possible (and what to do if you don’t); and Kay Achenbach from the Open Data Institute explained the problems with ‘messy’ data, and how to fix them.

    You can watch the video here, or read the detailed report below.

    Preparing for an FOI project

    After Exploitation is a non-profit organisation using varied data sources, including FOI requests, to track the hidden outcomes of modern slavery in the UK.

    Maya explained that they often stitch together data from different sources to uncover new insights on modern slavery. She began with a case study showing some recent work they had done, using WhatDoTheyKnow to help them understand the longer term outcomes after survivors report instances of trafficking. This stood as an excellent example of how much work needs to be done before sending your requests, if you are to be sure to get the results you need.

    In this case, After Exploitation were keen to understand whether there is any truth in widely-held assumptions around why human trafficking cases are dropped before they are resolved: it’s often thought that there are factors such as the survivors themselves not engaging with the police, perhaps because of a nervousness around authorities.

    But what are these assumptions based upon? Actual information was not publicly available, so we wouldn’t know if cases were being dropped because of low police resource, a lack of awareness or more nuanced factors. Until the data could be gathered and analysed, the perceptions would continue, perhaps erroneously.

    Before starting, After Exploitation thought carefully about the audience for their findings and their ultimate aims: in this case the audience would be mostly the media, with the aim of correcting the record if the results flew in face of what was expected; but they knew that the data would also be of use to practitioners. For example, charities could use it to see which areas to target regionally for training and other types of intervention.

    They placed FOI requests with police forces across the country, making sure to ask for data using the crime codes employed by the forces: were cases dropped because of ‘lack of evidence’; did they have a status of ‘reported’ but not gone on to exist as an official crime record?

    The project had a good outcome: while some requests had to go to internal review, ultimately over 80% of the forces responded with quality data. The findings were worthwhile, too: general perceptions did indeed prove to be wrong and there was no indication that ‘no suspect identified’ was a result of the victim’s lack of involvement. The resulting story was able to challenge the general narrative.

    So, how can After Exploitation’s learnings be applied to the work of other organisations or campaigns?

    Maya says:

    • Planning, rather than analysis, is the majority of the work;
    • Identify the need and purpose before you even start to pick which authorities to send requests to;
    • Be clear who the audience for your findings is;
    • Consult with other stakeholders to make sure your parameters are really clear.

    Planning

    Before you even begin, make sure your project isn’t asking for data that has already been collected and is in the public domain — this might seem obvious but it’s easy to overlook. Check other people’s FOI requests (you can do this by searching on WhatDoTheyKnow); look for reports, research, inspectorate/watchdog outputs, and data released as part of parliamentary enquiries.

    That said, even if you do find previous data, there is sometimes value in requesting more up to date or more detailed information with a new set of FOI requests. If you see a national report collating data from every council for example, you could do an FOI project asking every council for a more detailed breakdown of what is happening in their region.

    But before sending a batch of requests to multiple authorities, ask yourself if there is a centralised source for your data. If so, then just one FOI request might be enough: for example, homelessness data is already collected by the Depts for Housing, Levelling Up and Communities, in which case one request to them would save time for both you, and more than 300 public authorities.

    Another question to ask before starting off on your project is “what is the social need?”. Does this need justify the resource you will expend? Mass FOI projects can be a bit of a time commitment, but the utility might not just be for your organisation: perhaps you can also identify a social benefit if the data would be of use to other groups, academics or journalists.

    Define your intended audience: will the data you gather be of interest to them? Do you have a sense of what they want? For example, MPs often like to see localised data that applies to their constituencies. Journalists like big numbers and case studies. If you think your findings are important but might have limited appeal, you could consider including an extra question to provide details that you don’t need for your own purposes, but which could provide a hook.

    Next, will the data that you gather actually be suitable for the analysis you want to perform? To avoid time-consuming mistakes, make sure the data you’ll receive is broken down in the way that you need. As an example, suppose you wanted to ask local authorities for details of programmes offered to children in different age bands: you might receive data from one council who has offerings for children ‘under 18 months’ and another ‘under two years old’ — and where units differ, they are difficult to compare and contrast. Be really precise in your wording so there’s no mismatch, especially if your request is going to a lot of authorities.

    Consider, too, whether you can you get enough responses to make your data meaningful: 2,000 people is the figure believed to be representative of the population as a whole. Decide how many responses you ideally need for your purposes — and, in a scenario where not all authorities respond, the minimum you can work with.

    You might want to contact other groups or organisations who could be interested in the same data, and ask if there are details that would be useful to their work.

    As suggested in Maya’s case study, try to use existing measurements where you can: if you shape your requests to the methodology the authorities themselves use to collect the information, such as KPIs or their own metrics of success, these will be much easier for them to supply.

    If you’re not sure what these metrics are, you can sometimes access internal guidance by googling the name of the authority plus ‘guidance’. Alternatively, submit scoping requests to a handful of authorities to ask how they measure success, etc.

    At this stage it’s also useful to decide what quality of data you will include or exclude. For example, if you ask about training materials and one authority says they offer training, but don’t include the actual materials, do you include it in your figures? The more authorities you ask, the more ambiguities like this you’ll normally encounter.

    Think about where and how you will log the data as it comes in. Maya recommended WhatDoTheyKnow Projects as a good tool for extracting data. Whatever you use, you should consider accessibility: can your platform be accessed by everyone you’re working with, across different communities? Especially if you are working with volunteers, it’s important to remember that not everyone has a laptop.

    Also consider the security of the platform: how much this matters will depend on how sensitive the data is, but recognise that Google sheets and many other platforms store the data in the cloud where it could be more vulnerable to abuse.

    After Exploitation take great pains to ensure that their data is accurate. They recommend that each response is assessed by two different people, making sure that everyone knows the criteria so they’re applied consistently; and doing regular spot checks on a handful of cases to make sure they are all logged in the same way and there’s no duplicate logging.

    This is time-intensive and arduous, but if you have other stakeholders they might be able to help with the data checking: for example, knowing that they would eventually place the story with the BBC, After Exploitation were happy to hand this task over to their inhouse data checkers.

    What if things go wrong?

    If you’ve done all the planning suggested above, it’s less likely that your project will go awry, but even if it does, Maya says that there’s always something you can do.

    No or few responses: ask yourself whether you have the capacity to chase no/late replies, and if you still don’t get a response, to refer them to the ICO. If not, consider prioritising the bodies that are most relevant to your work, eg the biggest authorities or those in areas with the densest populations; but be prepared to defend accusations that not every authority had a fair hearing unless you do them all.

    If you know your requests were well worded, but you’re not getting a lot of responses — perhaps because you’re dealing with a contentious issue, or simply because the authorities cash-strapped — you could shift to measuring the types of responses you get. If authorities aren’t able to answer the question, this can often be just as revealing.

    Responses that don’t tell you what you set out to understand: Consider whether there are any alternative angles in the data you do have: are there any additional themes, particularly in any free text fields? Or try a new round of requests asking for more detailed information.

    Responses don’t cover the whole country: If you can’t get data from everywhere, could you narrow down to just one area and still have useful findings? Even the most basic data can set the scene for other researchers or organisations to build on: you can put it out and outline the limitations.

    Results

    The impact of gathering data through FOI can be massively powerful, as After Exploitation’s work shows. They have revealed the wrongful detention of thousands of potential victims of human trafficking when the government were denying it could happen; opened the debate about locking up vulnerable people; and uncovered the flawed decision making in the Home Office on modern slavery cases. It was only through FOI requests that all this information came into the public domain and was picked up by mainstream media.

    Combining different sources of data to create datasets

    Kay Achenbach is a data trainer on the Open Data Institute’s learning team; the ODI works with government and companies to create a world where data is working for everyone.

    Kay shared a case study from the medical field, in which an algorithm was being designed to quickly assess high numbers of chest x-rays. The aim was to automate the process so that people identified as needing intervention would be sent to specialists right away.

    The developers wanted to make sure that different demographic groups weren’t being biased against, a common issue with algorithms built on existing data which can contain previously undetected biases.

    The test material was a set of x-rays from a diverse population, that had already been examined by specialists. They ran them past the algorithm to see if the diagnoses produced were the same as those made by human doctors.

    The doctors’ assessments came from three different datasets which, combined, comprised data from more than 700,000 real patients. As soon as you combine datasets from different sources, you are likely to come across discrepancies which can make analysis difficult.

    In this case, one dataset had diagnoses of 14 different diseases, and another had 15 — and from these, only eight overlapped. The only aspect that could for sure be compared was the “no finding” label, applied when the patient is healthy. That limitation set what the algorithm was asked to do.

    Other fields were problematic in various ways: only one of the three sources contained data on ethnicity; one source only contained data on the sickest patients; another was from a hospital that only takes patients with diseases that they are studying, meaning there were zero “no finding” labels. Two of the sources contained no socio-economic data. Sex was self-reported in two of the sources, but assigned by clinicians in the other, which could also affect outcomes.

    The advice from all this is that you should look carefully at each dataset before you combine them, to see what the result of combining them would be. In short: does it reflect real life?

    Ultimately the researchers found that the algorithm was reflecting existing biases: it was much more likely to under-diagnose patients from a minority group; more likely to make mistake with female patients, the under 20s, Black people, and those from low socio-economic groups. The bias was compounded for those in more than one of those groups.

    Cleaning up datasets

    Once you’ve obtained your datasets from different FOI requests, you’re highly likely to find mismatches in the data that can make comparisons difficult or even impossible — but cleaning up the data can help.

    For example, in spreadsheets you might discover empty fields, text in a numbers column, rows shifted, dates written in a variety of formats, different wording for the same thing, columns without titles, typos and so on.

    Kay introduced a tool from Google called Refine that will solve many of the issues of messy data, and  pointed out that the ODI has a free tutorial on how to use it, which you can find here.

  4. Guest post: What are the questions MPs ask that don’t get answered?

    This blog post is part of our Repowering Democracy series. We are publishing a series of short pieces of writing from mySociety staff and guest writers who are thinking about how our democracy works and are at the frontlines of trying to improve it.

    This week, we’re re-publishing a blog post from Anna Powell-Smith at the Centre for Public Data, which is a new, non-partisan non-profit working for stronger public data. We’re previously worked together on recommendations to avoid fragmented public data. This blog post touches on several issues close to our hearts: Parliamentary written questions, and where there isn’t enough data to understand what’s going on.

    Data gaps are under-reported, because it’s hard to write about data that doesn’t exist.

    As we’ve written about before, newspapers publish endless stories on house prices, where there’s lots of data – but few on rental costs, even though millions of people rent. That’s partly because the Office for National Statistics doesn’t collect much data on rentals.

    To tackle this problem, I’ve been thinking about how to map data gaps, and make them more visible.

    And I think the best way is actually to think about questions, instead of data. What are the important questions that the government can’t answer?

    Obviously, ‘important’ is subjective! But one source of clearly important questions is Parliamentary written questions, which are the formal questions that MPs and peers ask the government. Where the government doesn’t have the data to answer them, it has to say so.

    So this post introduces new research: a data analysis of 200,000 Parliamentary written questions, and what they tell us about the UK’s missing numbers.

    Our modest goal: to find the UK’s biggest data gaps.



    What we did

    Building on some previous research of ours, we strapped on our coding hats 🪖, and did the following:

    • First, we scraped all the written questions in Parliament from December 2019 to February 2023, from TheyWorkForYou, which gaves us about 200,000 questions.
    • Next, we flagged questions asking for quantitative information, with phrases like “how many” or “how much” – which showed that about a fifth of questions wanted data, just under 40,000.
    • Then we flagged questions where the government apparently said the data was “not held”, “not collected”, etc. About a quarter of quantitative questions were answered like this.

    And we ended up with a dataset of around 10,000 questions where MPs apparently both (i) asked for data, and (ii) were told it was not available. So: missing numbers.

    Then we spot-checked the questions to check our method. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very decent. (It helps that Parliament uses formal, consistent language.) You can download the full dataset here.

    Sometimes, MPs ask about strange things, like jobs for clowns. But most are extremely serious, covering the issues that affect MP’s constituents. And overall, they tell us what MPs need to know.

    Data gaps by department

    Firstly, we looked at how often each government department said that data wasn’t available. (See the code.) And there were were huge differences:

    • At the Department of Health & Social Care, around 40% of quantitative requests were unanswered (though we can cut them some slack, as this was during the Covid pandemic).
    • At the Home Office and the Department for Work & Pensions, around a third were; at the Ministry of Justice the proportion of unanswered quantitative requests was 30%, and the Department for Education 27%.
    • But the proportion was much lower at other big departments – almost all others were below 20%.

    Of course, we need to be cautious here, as the numbers are approximate. Without reading each question, we can’t be sure that we’ve tagged it correctly, or if the MP was asking something impossible. It’s probably most useful to consider the differences between departments.

    Given that, it’s not surprising that the health, benefits, justice and education departments would get requests for data, since they run massive operational services that affect people’s lives. (The Foreign Office, by contrast, largely seems to get asked about wine.) It’s more surprising that they seem to struggle to answer them more than other departments.

    Now let’s dive into what these unanswered questions were about.

    The topics with the biggest data gaps

    Each question scraped has a title. We can use this to see which topics were least likely to get an answer.

    Other than Covid-related topics, the major topics with the highest proportion of unanswered questions were:

    1. Benefits – grouping together benefits like Universal Credit and PIP
    2. Asylum, refugees and migrants
    3. Child maintenance
    4. Energy meters
    5. Armed forces housing

    This seems plausible. The DWP Select Committee has repeatedly criticised the government for the lack of visibility over the benefits system; the statistics regulator has expressed concerns about the use of asylum statistics, while the National Audit Office has noted gaps in the data available on smart meters.

    We also used GPT-4 to try tagging questions, which worked quite well. We used it to tag questions to the Department of Health & Social Care. This helped us identify major clusters of unanswered questions in these areas.

    In healthcare, MPs often struggled to get basic prevalence information, whether:

    Also, funding is a topic it’s surprisingly difficult to get information about, e.g.

    Following on from this, hospital-level information in general often seems to be poor, e.g.:

    And finally, workforce is a huge one, with topics like:

    You can see the tagged questions here – there are many more examples under each topic.

    This gets really worrying when you look at the dataset over time. It’s immediately clear that MPs often ask the same thing over and over again – yet the information doesn’t seem to improve.

    What next?

    We think statistics producers should be monitoring Parliamentary questions, to tell them where data needs to be better. After all, MPs deserve answers to their questions, and so do we all.

    If you can help us make this happen, we’d love to talk.

    If you’re interested in this research – or even better, if you can fund us to do more of it! – please do get in touch.

    Image: Tom Chen on Unsplash.

  5. Council Climate Action Scorecards help councillor to get a sustainability motion passed

    We were more than delighted when this news story crossed our radar, showing in detail how Cllr Andrew Murray, of Newry, Mourne and Down District Council, used the Council Climate Action Scorecards to gain support from his fellow councillors for climate action.

    Cllr Murray’s proposed motion even referred to the Scorecards themselves:

    “This Council acknowledges the work done to date to help address the climate emergency; reaffirms previous motions regarding the degenerating global situation; and again, reiterates that the crisis is the biggest threat posed to our constituents, our district, and our planet.

    “Further acknowledges, however, that recent data collated by Climate Emergency UK ranks NMDDC 8th out of the 11 Councils within NI; and thus, pledges to include ambitious targets in the forthcoming Sustainability and Climate Strategies and Action Plans to expedite implementation.

    Cllr Murray went on to explain that the council was below the averages for Northern Ireland in five sections of the Scorecards, albeit that in two — Building & Heating and Waste Reduction & Food – they had scored better than most of their NI fellow councils. Finally, he pointed out that their scores may have suffered from a lack of communication around the council’s recent activity.

    We admired this intervention for its use of the Scorecards to do several things: point out where the council was lagging behind others in the country; give recognition to the areas where Scorecard rankings were above average; and to point out that some action they were taking may not be visible enough to outside observers.

    All of these points were given further legitimacy by the fact that the Scorecards are an independent project, providing an objective set of benchmarks.

    We got in touch with Cllr Murray to ask him more. He was a strong advocate for his local area, happy to describe its many charms:

    “I am an elected representative for the Slieve Croob DEA,” he told us, “which lies within Newry, Mourne and Down District Council. I live in a wee town called Castlewellan. We’ve lots of forests, hills and coast within my area, and the council area as a whole.”

    Sounds like an area where it’s well worth protecting the natural environment then! So, how did the Scorecards help?

    Cllr Murray explains: “The Scorecards were very useful. I used them as an impetus to draw up a motion asking our council to attribute targets to actions they are taking, or will take in the future, regarding climate change and the environment. 

    “Because the Scorecards were collated as well as being subdivided into relevant sections, I was able to curate my speaking notes appropriately.

    “But they were also useful for a number of other reasons: firstly, they averaged out what other councils in Northern Ireland were attaining. In Northern Ireland, we have different responsibilities to our English, Scottish and Welsh counterparts. So to have them separated out regionally meant that Council Officers could not simply bat away the motion by saying the cards were not relevant – there are demonstrable things that other councils within Northern Ireland are doing that we are not. 

    “That is not to say that they were simply used as a stick with which to beat Officers! There were aspects in which our council was above average, so this allowed praise to be allocated to the areas in which it was deserved. 

    “Likewise, there were areas in which, from my reading of them and my understanding of the council, I think that there are some functions we are actually already performing but haven’t communicated – ergo, we could easily improve our score. 

    “The Scorecards enabled me to lay things out succinctly and clearly, and I was able to get the motion passed. The hope is that sections of them can be incorporated into the targets for the council, and we can ultimately improve on our climatic and environmental impact. 

    “Obviously if that means we improve our position amongst other Northern Ireland councils, then happy days. But, as the saying goes, an incoming tide raises all boats – so if our position remains the same, but councils everywhere become more sustainable and mitigate our impact on the environment, then that’s a good thing all round. But ultimately, we have to control the things that we affect here in Newry, Mourne and Down District Council.”

    That is exactly what we like to hear, and goes a long way to exemplifying exactly why Climate Emergency UK and mySociety came together to produce the Scorecards project. 

    We are very glad that Councillor Murray was able to use them for furthering climate action in his beautiful corner of Northern Ireland — and we hope councillors everywhere will take inspiration from his method for doing so.

    Image: Shan Marsh Bubashan

  6. Democracy month notes: February

    Previously: January!

    Gaza ceasefire blog post

    I wrote a blog post about the Gaza Ceasefire opposition day votes – especially focusing on how there ended up being no recorded votes. 

    This is the kind of responsive work we’d like to do more of. We don’t need to duplicating every explainer out there, but we want to be able to better articulate “this is how Parliament works, but there’s something wrong with that” when there’s currently something confusing/going wrong in the news. 

    Asking for money to do good things

    Alice, Julia and I have been putting together a more structured version of the idea I talk about at the bottom of this blog post about our new spreadsheet of the register of interests — using crowdsourcing to create good, understandable summaries of MPs interests. Will let you know how that goes. 

    Something we’d like to get better at is being more public when these applications for funding do not work out (spoiler: this happens a lot!). There’s a lot of work and creativity that goes into our ambitions for TheyWorkForYou, and ideally these wouldn’t just be locked away in various virtual desk drawers. 

    Oflog consultation

    Julia worked with our friends at the Centre for Public Data on a joint response to an Office for Local Government (OFLOG) consultation – read more about that

    This is a continuation of our work around public data fragmentation

    Small API updates

    Matthew has added Parliament’s unique identifier to the response to the ‘getMPInfo’ API call, making it easier to jump from our data to query the Parliament API.

    Server upgrades

    Sam and Matthew have been upgrading the servers that run TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

    We need to do this periodically for security reasons: the organisations that distribute the server software (and other packages we depend on, like those that distribute the programming languages) only provide security and bug fixes for a certain period, after which they only provide it for newer versions. 

    Running software on the web — where there are *constantly* bad people testing for weaknesses — means taking this seriously. But upgrading the lower levels of the “stack” often means small changes further up where features we use have been deprecated and replaced with other approaches. Some of this work is running just to stay in the same place, but it does also enable us to adopt new approaches in how we code and the packages we use. 

    This is one of the massive benefits of the same organisation running TheyWorkForYou AND WhatDoTheyKnow AND FixMyStreet AND (many more) – we have excellent people thinking hard about our technical infrastructure across all our work. 

    Voting summary update

    We’ve done some of the trickiest technical work required to enable the voting summary update we’re planning.

    We’ve moved TheyWorkForYou from pointing at the Public Whip website, where it used to get voting summary calculations, to an instance of a new,experimental “twfy-votes” platform. This is doing the work Public Whip was originally doing, but also taking over the party comparison calculations that were being done in TheyWorkForYou itself previously. 

    TheyWorkForYou has become simpler, and more of the relevant code is now in the same place. We’re not yet completely independent of the Public Whip because twfy-votes currently uses the database dump to populate itself — but soon we’ll be able to move that to an export from TheyWorkForYou’s own database. 

    The goal in this set of changes is to move from this:

    Diagram showing the flow of data from the Hansard XML, through Parlparse, into both TheyWorkForYou and the PublicWhip - with that then reentering theyworkforyou and additional calculations being done to calculate voting summaries

    To this:

    Diagram showing the different flow of data from the Hansard XML - through ParlParse to TheyWorkForYou, and a feedback look between TWFY and TWFY-VOTES

    Which is… still a lot of boxes and arrows, but is better than it was. This could in principle then be simplified even further, but this brings the whole process under our control and simplifies some of the back and forth steps. 

    Currently, all this work should have resulted in almost no visible changes to the site. But we now can flip a switch and it will switch the underlying algorithm used from the one in the Public Whip to the new (simplified) approach.  One of the motivations behind this shift is to be fully in control of that algorithm (which is effectively a number-based editorial policy). 

    One of the things I’ve been doing this month is running the analysis to clearly map what exactly the public effect of this will be. Broadly, most things stay the same, which is good because we don’t want the headline messages to be hugely affected by different methodologies behind the scenes – At the same time we’ll end up with something that is easier to explain. 

    The final stage before full release is a set of less technical changes, consolidating the voting summary information on one page, and adding a rewritten page describing both how Parliamentary voting works in different places across the UK, and what our approach is in the data we publish. Making good progress on these, and hope to have this project completed soon. 

    That’s all for now

    As ever, if you’re the kind of person who reads to the end of these (I’m going to assume a generally nice person who is also a fan our our work) – donations are welcome. But also get in touch if you’ve got something to chat with us about!

    Header image: Photo by yasin hemmati on Unsplash

  7. Climate monthnotes: January & February

    It’s so tempting to start each of these with a clichéd “where did the time go?” or “how is it X month already?”, but in this case, it really does feel like 2024 is running away from us! 

    January kicked off with Louise, Alex and I heading to the Democracy Network conference, where the theme of climate ran throughout lots of the discussions. If you are also interested in the intersections between climate, democracy and civic tech, you’ll be delighted to know that the call for proposals TICTeC 2024 is out now!

    At the start of February, Annie from Climate Emergency UK and I worked on a piece that was published in the LGC, responding to an article from Richard Clewer asking for more emissions data in the Council Climate Action Scorecards. We agreed with Richard that more scoped emissions data would strengthen the scorecards. But, without a statutory reporting framework, that data simply doesn’t exist. We pointed to our fragmented data asks, that I’ve written about in these parts before. Also on our fragmented data work, our joint response with the Centre for Public Data to the Housing & Levelling Up inquiry has been published on the committee’s website. Two great examples of collaborative working to kick off the year!

    The big ticket item for the last few months has of course been the Local Intelligence Hub, our joint project with the Climate Coalition, which launched to the public on 15th February! We’ve had such brilliant feedback from the launch, including great coverage in national and local media outlets. Zarino and I have been demonstrating the Hub to anyone who’ll have us (get in touch if you’d like your own demo!) — or watch Zarino’s brilliant short videos on YouTube. Struan and Alexander have been working through the datasets at phenomenal speed, and Myf has been doing wonderful messaging on Twitter and over on LinkedIn.

    There are plans afoot to add even more data, so if you’re sitting on datasets that you think would be useful to yourself and others as part of the Hub, let us know! We’re especially interested in data organised by the new constituency boundaries, which I explain in more detail in a blog post about the recent byelections. Zarino made the most of the extra leap year day with several of our friends from the sector, at an event about data and the new constituencies.

    Alongside all of the excitement about Local Intelligence Hub, the wheels are starting to turn for the next round of the Climate Action Scorecards. Siôn, Zarino and I have all attended different section-specific roundtables, which have involved brilliant discussions with council officers and industry experts. I’ll be joining the CE UK team at the Scorecards Report Launch & Conference on the 21st: hope to see some of you there! 

    Photo by Chandan Chaurasia on Unsplash

  8. Telling stories with FOI data

    In the second seminar of our Using Freedom of Information for Campaigning and Advocacy series, we learned how to use information from FOI requests to create stories and further your cause. 

    First, we heard the experience of two different campaign groups — Privacy International and Climate Emergency UK — in getting their stories into the public eye; this was followed by tips from freelance journalist Rosie Taylor about pitching to newspapers.

    You can watch the whole video over on YouTube, or read the summary below.

    Privacy International

    Ilia Siatitsa

    Privacy international is a UK-based organisation, working with partners around the world to research and advocate against governmental and corporate abuses of data and technology. 

    They’ve used FOI requests as a source of information that feeds into campaigns and advocacy for many years. Sometimes they use a preliminary round of FOI requests to help inform a subsequent, more focused one.

    Their Neighbourhood Watched campaign, which investigated the use of new surveillance technologies by the UK police, is a good example (we’ve written about it before here). Privacy International submitted fact-finding FOI requests to many police forces across the UK, asking which technologies were being used at a local level for law enforcement.

    The responses enabled them to identify several different types of tech, and that there was a massive regulatory gap around this area of law enforcement, with new, invasive technologies having been introduced before any guidance was put in place.

    The information they obtained via FOI has inspired a number of different actions within a wider, multi-year campaign. Privacy International first rallied their supporters to write to their local Police and Crime Commissioner to ask for more information and better regulation. 

    They later launched a similar campaign around police technologies being used at protests, producing a guide to inform people attending marches, so they knew what tech was being deployed by police, and how to mitigate some of the exposure.

    They also made follow-up FOI requests around the specific technologies that their first round had identified. In this second round of FOI requests, Privacy International found that the responses were all coming back as refusals, using very similar or identical language and stating that the authorities could not confirm or deny that the information was held. 

    Privacy International attempted to challenge these refusals via the ICO, but they were upheld; a subsequent appeal at the Information Rights Tribunal also upheld the decision and denied a request to appeal. Undaunted by this setback, Privacy International have moved back to advocacy, sending letters to police oversight bodies to point out that every other country that has introduced these technologies to their police forces has been more transparent about them. In 2020 they published a report criticising the way the police were using mobile phone extraction (where the contents of your phone are copied, no password required), calling for reform and safeguards.

    So, while Privacy International haven’t yet won the battle, they continue to fight — and this is a good example of how FOI can form the basis of a multi-year campaign with many outputs, audiences and facets.

    Here are Ilia’s top tips for submitting requests — also make sure you see our previous seminar, Getting the most from FOI, for lots more advice.

    Top tips for FOI requests from Privacy International

    Questions from the audience:

    Q: Can you make a rejection into the story?
    A: You can, but it depends how you want to play it: you might decide that you don’t want the refusal decision to be out in public, setting a precedent for how authorities reply to responses. Privacy International are also trying a new approach, sending a different set of questions to see if that gets them better results. 

    Q: One of your tips is “format matters”: any further advice here?
    A: Authorities might try to give the least information possible, using the way you’ve formatted your question to minimise what they share, so look carefully at how you’ve worded your request before sending it, and consider how it might be responded to with this mindset. 

    It can be very useful to use a yes/no question: this only takes the authority moments to answer. 

    Or, rather than asking for stats, try asking for the documents that those stats can be found within. Responding to this type of request takes less time for the authority, but their response will contain more information. 

    Authorities often come back and say that your request needs to be narrowed down, so that can be a strategy too: start with a broad request which you’ll be happy to whittle down, knowing that you actually want the narrower information.

    Climate Emergency UK

    Isaac Beevor 

    Climate Emergency UK (CE UK) was founded around five years ago, with the aim of collating data and information on UK councils’ climate emergency declarations. Since then they’ve worked with mySociety to create CAPE, which collates all UK councils’ Climate Action Plans, and the Council Climate Action Scorecards, which first assessed all the plans, and subsequently councils’ actual climate action.

    Isaac explained that in order to gather data for the latest iteration of the Scorecards, they’d sent around 4,000 FOI requests to UK local authorities: these were all asking for data which couldn’t be obtained by other means.

    These requests, which were worded very specifically, allowed CE UK to compile data on: 

    • Councils’ staffing levels for climate and implementing Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG);
    • The average energy efficiency (EPC) ratings of council homes and the enforcement of the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES);
    • Whether councillors and management were receiving carbon literacy training;
    • Whether the councils were lobbying their devolved national government, or the UK government, for further powers or funding.

    As well as giving vital information that fed into the Scorecards project, the request about EPC ratings resulted in an exclusive [paywalled] on page two of the Financial Times.

    Isaac shared how CE UK went about achieving this coverage, noting that any organisation could do the same: they are a small and relatively new charity, but followed some logical steps to pitch their story, and it paid off. 

    First of all, they identified three potential stories, analysing the data they’d received and looked for trends within it to see what stood out the most. They wrote the headline for each, to make it easy for a journalist to imagine the piece and the way the data could be framed. 

    CE UK also considered the stories’ relevance to what was in the news at the time. The cost of living crisis was very much in the zeitgeist, and that tied in well with their data around low energy efficiency standards in council housing.

    They identified which newspaper they wanted to target, and found a suitable journalist to approach, and then simply emailed them with both the headlines and the detail to back them up. Isaac advises that it is reasonable to pitch a few potential stories at one time, especially if you have such rich data that you can pull several angles out of it. 

    Finally, Isaac advises that having given your framing to the journalist, you must allow them the freedom to emphasise whichever parts of the story they want to, based on your clear explanation of the data and what it is saying.

    Questions from the audience:

    Q: Did CE UK use EIR (Environmental Information Regulations) requests? 

    A: The requests were sent with a note that the authorities should feel free to treat them as either EIR or FOI requests. In these cases, the responses would be much the same so the distinction wasn’t a great concern for CE UK.

    Q: How can one identify the right journalist to approach? 

    A: CE UK were guided by where they wanted the story to go, based on the reputation of the paper. Ideally you can then identify a journalist who has an interest in your subject matter. Clearly they won’t know your data as well as you do, so make sure they understand the context — be really clear in explaining what your data is about. And it’s fine to pitch to more than one journalist: give them a deadline to respond by and if they don’t, move on to another.

    Q: If the paper has a paywall how do you ensure as many people as possible see the story? 

    A: As well as the FT exclusive, which gave that paper the ability to print first, CE UK later sent a press release round to more general and sector press. This was also picked up by many.

    Rosie Taylor, freelance journalist

    Rosie specialises in health and consumer affairs, writing news and features across all national press, and she often uses FOI in work. She also works with organisations to improve their media coverage. 

    Rosie began by listing five key things to consider when pitching a story to the newspapers:

    1. Relevance Your story needs to be relevant to that publication’s readers. All publications have slightly different audiences with unique interests and concerns.
    2. Timeliness Can you hook into topics that are being talked a lot at the moment in the news? Make sure the journalist knows ‘why now?’.
    3. Ease How easy are you making it for the editor to say yes? Overworked journalists don’t have time to build up a story, so ideally you should provide a complete package. If you’re giving them data, it’s all the better if you can give them the top line but also attach the datasets. Line up experts, provide case studies and pictures — it all really helps. Look at what a finished article looks like on the page: that is everything you’re going to need.
    4. Targeting Make sure you’re sending your pitch to the right journalist in the right section of the right publication. Read the publication yourself and look at the stories; become familiar with which journalists are covering certain topics.
    5. Timing Pitch plenty of time ahead of when you want the story to be published, to allow time for the journalist to write it.

    When considering which news outlet you are targeting, you need to look at your ultimate aim: for example, the Financial Times is read by changemakers, so it fits the needs of many campaign or advocacy groups well. Perhaps you just want more people to know about your organisation, in which case a mass readership publication would suit you better.

    We tend to think of each newspaper as a single entity but in fact they can contain different sections, each with their own editor and journalists, and slightly different  interests, audiences and timescales.

    It pays to know which section you are targeting, and what you want it to look like on the page. Will the story be a few paragraphs or are you hoping for a double page spread?

    You might pitch your story to local papers rather than a national. In fact, many of these are syndicated across the whole country, so you can still effectively attain national coverage that way.

    If you are pitching to a daily newspaper with a Sunday edition: is it a seven-day operation, or are they two separate papers? For example, you shouldn’t pitch the Times and the Sunday Times simultaneously, as they run autonomously, while the Telegraph just runs seven days a week.

    Similarly, some papers have a different team producing online content, like the Daily Mail newspaper and Mail Online.

    Don’t feel that you have to write off a whole publication just because you’ve had a ‘no’ from one section – if the Sunday paper says no, you can still pitch the dailies; if the Health section says ‘no’, you can try another section.

    There are two ways of pitching: ‘all round’, which goes to several papers at once, or as an exclusive.

    All-rounds

    If you are sending your story to multiple outlets at the same time, always put an embargo on the press release (a date and time after which it can be published). This ensures that you have control over the moment of release, and journalists welcome it as it gives them the time to write the story up.

    Make your embargo clear: you can put it in big red capital letters, add it to the email title, et cetera. The general convention for print is an embargo of 00:01 (one minute past midnight) for the story to appear in the following day’s papers.

    Online outlets really like embargos in the middle of the day (but that timing is a nightmare for print, so pick one). For broadcast, you can time the embargo to their news bulletins.

    Make sure you’re available in the run-up to the embargo, including having your experts or case studies at hand, in case there are any extra questions. If you have embargoed the story for a Monday release, that means being available on the Sunday.

    An all-round is always a gamble, because it can be scuppered by a bigger news story arising; with an exclusive you can discuss timing with your journalist and they might have the flexibility to put it out at a later date if that is still appropriate. 

    Exclusives

    With an exclusive, you can work with one publication and focus on getting quality coverage. You can still set an embargo if the timing is important to you; you can also do a joint exclusive for print and broadcast, so long as you are transparent with all parties.

    As Isaac mentioned, if one paper declines your story, take it to another — you can pretend you’re still offering it to them first!

    Be very clear that you’re offering your story as an exclusive. Explain why it is relevant to them, their readers, and is timely. You should do this further ahead of time than with an all-round, especially bearing in mind that you may have to pitch to more than one outlet; also, they might want to examine your data and go into the story more deeply.

    As soon as your exclusive story has been published, you can send to all the other press and see if any of them pick it up — so an exclusive doesn’t tie your story to a single paper for good.

    Timing

    While Rosie says one shouldn’t be too hung up on timing — it is much more important to have a strong story — it does help to know the cycles to which newspapers work. 

    Sunday papers have a day off on a Monday; pool ideas on Tuesdays and most of the content has been written by the Thursday. Pitch a few weeks ahead.

    Daily papers work to rough weekly cycles. They have more space on Saturdays, when they like lighter stories with good human interest; while the Monday edition is smaller but also the most serious – a good time for dryer, data-driven stories.

    On Sundays, daily papers tend to have a skeleton staff, so they might be grateful of a fully-worked story. Pitch on the Wednesday of the previous week, with an embargo for Monday morning, and your story will be worked on by the Sunday staff who will be glad to have something easy to include.

    Supplements and weekly sections within daily papers all have their own cycles, so just pitch a couple of weeks ahead of when you need to run.

    Questions from the audience

    Q: Is it better to pitch to a freelancer like Rosie, or directly to a paper?

    A: There are plusses to both, but Rosie says there are several benefits to pitching to a freelancer: they can pitch to multiple publications, know all the editors and know instinctively which would be the best fit. Plus they have an incentive to get your story published, because they are paid on publication.

    On the other hand, staff journalists have more weight with the papers, so it’s easier for them to get stories in.

    Q: Is it best to phone or email?

    A: Don’t ever phone. The journalist will see your email – but they do get a lot, so you need to make sure it is eye-catching. If you are offering an exclusive, make it very clear that this is a personal email intended for its recipient, not a generic one.

    Q: What sort of case studies could we be providing?

    A: Even if your story is just based on data, there will still be a human impact in the story. For example, looking at the energy standards story, you could find someone who lives in an energy inefficient home or who hasn’t got money for their bills.

    Q: How do big investigations get funded? 

    A: Most are funded in-house, and developed internally. You might find yourself working with the newspaper’s own team. Complex stories take time, so you need a newspaper on board to pay for your time and any equipment you need. Sometimes, organisations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism apply for grants to help them with in-depth stories.

  9. Getting the most from FOI

    We are currently running a series of free, online seminars on Using Freedom of Information for Campaigning and Advocacy

    The aim is to upskill social change organisations, particularly those working with marginalised communities and with limited capacity. Attendees will come away from these sessions with the skills and understanding they need to support their campaign or advocacy work through FOI — and, by sharing the videos, we hope that the benefits will spread further, too.

    The first seminar in the series was on Getting the Most From FOI

    Jen, mySociety’s Projects and Partnerships Manager, gave practical advice on how to shape FOI requests to maximise the chances of a full response; what the outcomes of a request might be; and how to deal with each of those outcomes.

    You can watch the video here. We’ll also summarise the advice below. 

     

    Framing and wording FOI requests

    The more thought you put into your request before submitting it, the better the outcomes are likely to be.

    Plan for your desired results

    Start by thinking about what you’re going to be using the information for. 

    • What are you trying to do with it? 
    • So what information do you need?
    • How are you going to use it? 

    For example, you might need the information to feed into some research, in which case you could request base level statistics. Or you might be looking for a big headline number to shape your request around, in which case you can make a single, very tightly defined request.

    Asking the right place for the right information

    Consider what information is actually recorded. You can only ask an authority for information they already hold — but that doesn’t necessarily just mean documents. Videos, photos, recordings, WhatsApp messages, etc all count as information, and can all be requested.

    Once you’ve narrowed down what you need, identify which authority holds the information. It’s worth doing some research here, as it might not always be the one you first think of.

    Keep your request well-defined 

    Consider how you word your request. If an authority has to come back and ask for further clarification, this resets the clock on the 20 working days within which they have to respond  — and it won’t begin until they’ve received your clarification. So it’s good to try and pre-empt the problems that might cause delay or rejections of your FOI request.

    Don’t be afraid to be very detailed: it’s better than missing something out. You can even include what you’re not interested in, to help narrow the request down.

    What time period do you want information from? State this, because otherwise the authority might assume you mean for all time, in which case it could be rejected as being too big a task and therefore taking too much staff time to compile. 

    Make sure you are extremely precise. For example, when you refer to “a year”, that might be interpreted as a calendar year, financial year, or school year, so specify which you mean.

    If there’s anything you already know about the information — like how the types of record you want are generally named, or where they might be found — add those details to your request. You can even send an initial FOI request to ask how the information is held at that authority, which can inform your main request.

    Make sure you’re asking for something the FOI officer can easily search for. As an example, asking for data about the ‘local area’ is too vague a term. So if you want information for a particular place, specify what you mean by providing the postcode, road names or the distance from a specific point.

    Doing this sort of preparation work is definitely worthwhile, especially in fast moving campaigns, as a clarification will cost you another 20 working days — ie four whole weeks.

    How to make a request on WhatDoTheyKnow

    Jen made a request during the seminar which you can watch step by step from the timestamp 25:52 to 37:39.

    Possible outcomes to FOI requests

    Once you’ve made your request, as noted, the authority has 20 working days within which they must respond. 

    If there is no response:

    • Nudge the authority to remind them about your FOI request – you can do this through WhatDoTheyKnow just by adding to the thread on your request page.
    • If after a few days there is still no reply, you can report the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office (the ICO) – more on this shortly.
    • If you decide you no longer need the information, and there’s no benefit to it being made public, you can (and should) withdraw your request.

    If you get a response:

    • Legally the authority must confirm or deny whether they hold the information (or tell you that they “neither confirm nor deny”).
    • In the best case scenario, the information you’ve asked for is released with no other issues.
    • As mentioned above, the authority might ask you for a clarification, because they need to understand your request better.
    • They might say they’re performing a Public Interest test (more on this below). There’s no legal time limit within which this must happen, though guidance from the ICO suggests it should be completed within 20 days.
    • Your request might be rejected. Again, more on this below.

    The Public Interest test

    The Public Interest test weighs the benefits to society of releasing the information against the arguments against releasing the information.

    When an authority rejects a request, it has to be because of one of several set reasons (called ‘exemptions’). Some of these exemptions require them to hold the public interest test before they can be applied.

    Other exemptions are absolute, that is they can be applied with no Public Interest test. The most common of these are:

    • Section 21 — the information is already in the public domain
    • Section 12 — the cost limit has been exceeded, ie it will take too much time or be too costly to fulfil your request.

    Some authorities include details of how they’ve applied the Public Interest test, and how they reached their conclusion, as part of a reply.

    Possible rejection responses

    A rejection to an FOI request may take one of several forms.

    • Information not held: the authority is saying that they don’t have the information you’re asking for. 
      • If you think that’s not right, resubmit your request after doing a bit more research. Include any evidence that supports your belief that they do have the information. It might simply be a matter of wording your request less ambiguously so that they know what you’re talking about.
      • You might ask for an internal review: this means requesting that the authority’s FOI team look at the decision making process applied to your request, and reconsider whether it was valid. This can be easily done via WhatDoTheyKnow: it guides you through the steps. And it’s worth doing: our research shows that, for example, 50% of refusals from local councils get overturned at the review stage. We recommend saying why you think an internal review should be performed (and in Scotland you must). 

    • You can ask the FOI team to pass your request along to the right place, or tell you who might hold the information so you can send it there.
    • The information is held, but your request has been rejected: If they are declining to provide the information you’ve asked for, the authority must explain which exemption — ie, authorised reason for rejection — it is applying (see below).
      • As above, if you don’t agree with their decision, you can ask for internal review, including your reasoning.

    Possible outcomes of an internal review

    After the internal review, there will be one of the following outcomes:

    • The exemption is overturned, and the information you asked for is released
    • The exemption is partially overturned, and some of the information is released
    • The exemption is upheld, and no information is released

    Possible reasons for rejection (exemptions)

    Understanding all the various exemptions that can be applied to an FOI request requires time and effort — but if you receive a refusal and you’re not sure what the exemption means, you can always ask the WhatDoTheyKnow team for help.

    All the FOI exemptions

    Jen mentioned a couple of the most common exemptions we see being applied:

    • Section 14: Vexatious or repeated requests. If you submit a lot of requests to the same authority within a short time frame, they might be seen as unreasonable (vexatious) — or they can be considered together by the authority, and then might hit the cost limit.
    • Section 8: Asking you to provide more information about yourself: for example, if you’ve made a request under the name of your organisation, the authority might ask you to provide a person’s name instead. Bear in mind that you don’t have to use your full name: you can use an initial and last name, or just your title and surname, etc.

    Prejudice test

    Exemptions can be ‘absolute’ or ‘qualified’ exemptions. If they are absolute, then there’s no further action necessary from the authority. For some qualified exemptions, however, they must carry out a prejudice test.

    This tests whether it can be demonstrated that there is a causal link between releasing the information you’re asking for, and harm arising.

    Scotland

    In Scotland, they have their own points of law around FOI, and they have their own Information Commissioner.

    Scottish law around FOI is covered by WhatDoTheyKnow’s Help page here

    If the authority still rejects your request after an internal review

    If you have been through the process of having your request refused, requesting an internal review and still receiving a refusal, you may wish to continue to pursue the information — especially if it’s valuable to your work and you disagree with the grounds on which the rejection has been made; or you feel there’s a strong case for the information to be in public.

    At this point you can take the matter to the ICO: fill in a form on their site or send an email to their review address (ICOCasework@ico.org.uk). Include your arguments as to why the information should be released.

    Before you do so, it’s a good idea to read and follow the ICO guidance. There’s a help page on WhatDoTheyKnow as well.

    The possible outcomes here are:

    • The ICO rules in your favour and will tell the authority to release the information. If they don’t comply they may be in contempt of court.
    • The ICO rules in favour of the authority’s non-release. This does not have to be the end of the matter; if really determined, you can go to tribunal and set out why you disagree with ICO’s decision. If you get to this stage, please do get in touch with the WhatDoTheyKnow team who can give help and advice.

    Image: Desola Lanre-Ologun

  10. Gaza Ceasefire votes and voting records

    What happened?

    Yesterday in the House of Commons, there was an SNP Opposition Day debate about a ceasefire in Gaza. This meant that the SNP had an opportunity to put forward a motion for the House to vote on.

    The Labour Party’s preferred wording of a ceasefire motion replaced the SNP motion and was passed by the House of Commons based on what is known as a voice vote. 

    This is when the speaker (in this case the Deputy Speaker who was in the chair) judges the result of the vote based on the volume of shouts in the chamber. As such, there is no record of how individual MPs voted.

    This is not the same as saying the vote was unanimous – and listening to the recordings there is a clear ‘no’ present on both votes (the Deputy Speaker does later claim that “nobody called against it”, which is then contested).

    From the Speaker’s point of view, the goal is taking a read on the decision of the House (and this may have been correct in that one side was louder, if not unopposed) – and a vote in the lobbies (division), which takes around 15 minutes, serves no purpose. 

    But votes also serve the purpose of putting the opinions of individual MPs on the record, which several were frustrated to have been denied. Votes are part of the public facts about MPs’ impact in Parliament, and part of how actions are communicated to constituents. This is a factor in the democratic process that also needs balancing in these decisions. 

    This decision followed a long division for a motion to sit in private – and votes that seemed clear on a voice vote may have been seen as costly in terms of time to take to a full division. In general, it is possible to have voting processes that are much faster and fairer to MPs, that would allow getting two votes on the record without taking most of an hour of parliamentary time. 

    What does this mean for TheyWorkForYou?

    Because there was no recorded division – the approval of the motion does not appear in the recent votes tab for MPs.

    The full debate is worth a read – the general sense is of a long debate where MPs engage with a complicated situation, and reflect that the UK’s role can only be part of any solution. 

    We’re in the process of updating the processes behind our voting summaries, which includes ways to include what we’re calling “agreements” (decisions without a “division”) in summaries. But issues like last night’s decision reflect that we need to take a cautionary approach – as there is clear evidence that it was not an unambiguous decision. We will publish more on this approach soon.

    Why was the amendment process controversial?

    As it was an SNP Opposition day, (a day when an Opposition party gets to choose the main debate) they got to propose the motion. Both Labour (another Opposition party) and the Conservative Party (Government party) proposed amendments to the motion.

    The Speaker went against previous convention and allowed both a Government and Opposition amendment – which was unexpected. The motivation of this was to give most MPs a chance to vote for a motion on their preferred wording – the problem is that the amendment process is not really set up for this.

    The thinking makes sense given how Opposition day voting is supposed to work: the Opposition by definition is not supposed to win because they have fewer MPs than the government.

    What’s supposed to happen is that MPs debate a topic, hold a vote, and the motion is rejected. If the topic strikes closer to home, the Government will amend it to say “this is an important issue but the Government is doing a great job”, and that is the motion that is passed because the Government should have the numbers to win the vote.

    Government amendments come after the vote on the main motion to respect the purpose of Opposition day debates, while reflecting the reality that the government can amend the motion and win. This sequencing allows for a vote on the pure motion on the record before the amended one wins.

    The same applies for amendments from other parties or backbenchers in the Opposition – these votes should also lose, and can be put before the motion without disrupting the flow.

    So what could have happened is: Labour amendment rejected (mostly by Government MPs), SNP motion rejected (mostly by Government MPs), Conservative amendment approved and adopted (mostly by Government MPs). In this scenario, most MPs have had a chance to vote for their party’s preferred wording, but this is only possible because the first few votes are rejected.

    In practice what seems to have fallen apart is the government approach – exactly why is still unclear but one suggestion is not enough Government MPs wanted to vote against the Labour wording, so to avoid an internal conflict they pulled their amendment and stopped opposing other votes. 

    This meant that Labour’s amendment won, it replaced the SNP motion and was passed as the main motion. 

    This outcome was the opposite of the one the Speaker’s choice was intended to facilitate. The SNP (and anyone who preferred the contents of their motion) didn’t get the chance to vote on their version, and no one generated a voting record either. A ceasefire motion passed, but no individual votes were recorded for it.

    The role of the Speaker

    The core issue is different ideas of what the Speaker is supposed to do. 

    In one reading the Speaker is supposed to be an agent to draw out the collective will of MPs, in another, the emphasis is on being non-partisan and reflecting a settled (cross-party) view of how the House of Commons operates. 

    The Clerk of the House advised not to allow both amendments, but also said that this was allowed by the rules, it went against previous approaches and risked that the SNP motion wouldn’t be voted on. The Speaker didn’t do anything inherently wrong by the rulebook, but has upset the sense that he was supposed to be a speaker who “innovated” less than his predecessor John Bercow.

    The virtue of deferring to the dead hand of precedent is that it shields the Speaker from the accusations of political bias. The outcome of this decision was good for Labour in that it avoided a split over the SNP vote, leading to a perception the rules were being bent in Labour’s favour. If this had threaded the needle and everyone had got the votes they wanted, this might have paid off. As it is, there’s a big question mark over whether the Speaker is trusted by MPs to be fulfilling the role. 

    The argument made by Owen Thompson (SNP) was that “the purpose of an Opposition day is for our party to have the ability to put forward our business”.  In general, Labour has a lot more Opposition days, where they haven’t chosen to propose their version of the motion. One of the SNP’s few days has resulted in SNP MPs not being able to put their views on the record. 

    But also if a motion would be preferred by the House it doesn’t seem undemocratic to include it. The amendment process is not meant to allow voicing opinions on three different things – but working towards a single statement that has majority support. If including more amendments changes the outcome, it is reasonable to include them on this basis. 

    This gets at different ideas of what voting in Parliament is for – is it for Parliament to come together and agree a consensus view, or for political actors to signal their divergent views? Both of these are legitimate purposes for a political body – especially when the goal of the motion is signally internationally (and also domestically) what the UK political establishment’s views are. 

    What does this mean for foreign policy?

    There’s a view that this kind of vote is navel gazing – and what MPs yell about over here doesn’t affect things over there. But this view is too narrow and misunderstands Parliament’s role as a political institution and how that relates to international politics.

    Motions can be broadly “doing something” or “saying something” motions, and this was a “saying something” motion. It doesn’t commit the government to do anything, and if it did, the government doesn’t have the power to impose a ceasefire tomorrow.

    In practical terms, it doesn’t matter what the Opposition thinks except in terms of the approach it signals in a possible next government. It does matter what government MPs are thinking however, and these motions seem to have flushed out some fault lines within the Conservative Party. Even if this isn’t on the voting record, it shapes internal discussion and policy making. 

    It is broadly good for the long term project of British diplomacy and coalitions with other countries where there is widespread consensus in Parliament on an action. Even partial support for bigger approaches within the governing party gives the Foreign Secretary more flexibility, and alignment with the likely next party of government similarly empowers the kind of statements and alliances that can be made. 

    So the vote does nothing in itself, but helps reveal what the political lie of the land actually is, and empowers actors working within it. Just because something is partial and political doesn’t mean it’s pointless.

    Political violence is shaping how representatives behave

    Another running thread here is the idea of political violence impacting decisions on the parliamentary agenda. The Speaker explicitly said the decisions he made on amendments were based on conversations “about the security of Members, their families and the people involved” – where MPs were considering their personal safety in weighing up if they could oppose motions by other parties. Regardless of whether you think it would be fine if more MPs had supported the SNP motion, it’s not good that this is part of the thinking in either direction. 

    This is part of a wider problem where political violence and threats of violence are collapsing political trust and openness – making politicians more suspicious of each other (seeing each other as whipping up mobs rather than engaging in politics), and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt to what may be passionate but legitimate participation of citizens in politics. 

    The parliamentary rulebook cannot take the weight of this – there are arguments about the extent to which allowing individual expression is an important purpose, but it can’t take the weight of allowing individual expression for the purposes of safety. 

    Here is where the recent Jo Cox Foundation report  No place in politics: tackling abuse and intimidation gives constructive steps. A key argument in the JCF report is that proportionate reactions to political violence can damage the relationship between representatives and their constituents. More safety measures and less public visibility make representatives less accessible. Its impact is not just in the one act, but the chilling effect it extends through the whole system that makes us more distant and suspicious of each other. 

    Reflecting this, the report puts a lot of time into a series of very practical measures to improve policing and reporting of threats and abuse, tying together different systems of support across Parliament, parties and policing. The clearest way to take abuse and intimidation seriously is to join up support and action on the least ambiguous cases. Politicians feeling that they are safe, and that threats against them are taken seriously, helps an environment where trust and openness support a better democratic system.

    Photo: UK Parliament – Central Lobby