This week I travelled to The Hague to take part in ATI Day 2026, organised by our friends SPOON and hosted by the Dutch Advisory Board on Public Access and Information Management (ACOI). We heard from a range of campaigners, journalists, lawyers and researchers working on access to information from across Europe and beyond, including colleagues from Poland, Hungary, India, France, Belgium, Canada, Scotland and the Netherlands.

The day was organised in advance of the Dutch government’s review of the Open Government Act (known as “Woo”). We were there to bring different answers to the question “What makes oversight of Freedom of Information laws effective?”. Our friends at SPOON, like many of us, are worried about the possibility of backsliding as part of the review process.

By bringing together practitioners from countries with very different systems directly into contact with the ACOI, we aimed to highlight practical lessons that could help strengthen the Dutch system. Rather than asking whether oversight bodies are needed (definitely yes!), the discussion focused on how they should be designed to make sure the right to information works in practice, not just theory.

Strong laws are only part of the picture

Although each country has a different legal system, the conversations throughout the day revealed remarkably similar challenges. Courts are often expensive and slow, ombudspeople are cheap or free but non-binding, information commissioners are effective but under-resourced. 

Marzena from Citizens Network Watchdog Poland explained that in Poland there is no dedicated information commissioner. Instead, requesters can only take cases to court. While this route is relatively inexpensive compared to legal routes in other countries, we heard that cases routinely take many months to resolve, and even a successful judgment does not necessarily mean the information is released. 

India has a network of information commissioners, but the transparency-averse government delays appointing commissioners in order to create significant backlogs and frustrate the system. In some states, commission offices sit empty while appeals continue to accumulate. Satark Nagrik Sangathan has published fantastic reports detailing this. 

At the European Union level, investigative journalist Alexander Fanta described another familiar dilemma: the European Ombudsman can investigate complaints and issue recommendations, but these are not binding. Going to court is possible, but often prohibitively slow and expensive. One recent transparency case from Client Earth reportedly cost around €20,000!

Our friends at FragDenStaat explained that there’s an imbalance in data-related legislation in Germany. Whilst there are significant statutory powers relating to data protection, the powers available to protect and uphold Freedom of Information are much weaker. One recent case relating to a rejected FOI request was successfully resolved using GDPR regulations rather than freedom of information law because those powers were stronger.

Beyond the law

In a quick 10 minute session, Toby Mendel of the Centre for Law and Democracy outlined six characteristics of effective oversight bodies. An oversight body, he argued, should be:

• independent from government
• specialised in access to information
• able to make binding decisions
• able to move beyond mediation to adjudication where necessary
• an accessible alternative to lengthy court proceedings
• responsible not only for appeals, but also for promoting the law through guidance, training and proactive publication.

Considering our own set up in the UK, I think the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a number of strengths: it is largely independent of government, can issue legally binding decisions, provides an accessible alternative to the courts, and invests heavily in guidance and support for both requesters and public authorities.

At the same time, the conversations in The Hague were a reminder that good institutional design is only part of the picture. An oversight body also needs the capacity to resolve complaints promptly and promote a culture of openness across the public sector. Like many regulators, the ICO operates under resource constraints, and delays in resolving complaints can undermine confidence in the system, even where the underlying legal framework is strong.

The ICO itself has recognised the challenges of maintaining timeliness while responding to an increasingly broad and complex regulatory workload. Looking across the different international models, the UK has much to value and recognise, but as we’ve written about in the past, we need to accept that effective oversight requires ongoing investment as well as good legislation.

Strengthening our systems

Perhaps the strongest theme of the day was that no single institutional model has solved the problem, and we all have work to do. Carole from the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland encouraged us not to settle – her work advancing the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill to strengthen their existing system was really inspiring.

It was encouraging to hear our hosts at ACOI reflected openly on areas where the Dutch system could be strengthened, including having greater investigative powers and binding decisions. I hope the day can serve as an example to decision makers in the Dutch government that strong ATI laws combined with effective oversight systems help support thriving democracies rather than diminish them. 

Stronger together

Ultimately, the day was a reminder of the value of international networks like the ATI Network. Bringing practitioners together creates space to learn from each other’s successes and setbacks, and hopefully collaborate together in future. Beyond the work of our own organisations, international attention matters to those in power. Knowing that colleagues across Europe and beyond are following developments, celebrating progress and raising concerns when transparency comes under pressure can strengthen domestic advocacy. By continuing to learn from one another, we stand a much better chance of making the right to information work not just on paper, but in practice.

If you want to help us to do more of this work, please consider donating.

Today we’ve published a new report with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, exploring how a future European civic tech hub could strengthen democratic participation across Europe.

You can read it online, or download as a PDF. 

Drawing on interviews with 19 civic tech organisations from 12 countries, we’ve wrestled with the opportunities and challenges facing participation and pro-democracy tech across Europe.

We’ve structured the report around three progress areas: increasing demand, strengthening supply, and optimising implementation. For each area, we identify both short term activities and longer term ambitions.

Recommendations

Jump to the recommendations section of the report

1. Increased demand

A recurring theme from our interviews was that the technical issues were only half of the problem. Many public authorities still need support to see participation itself as a valuable tool for better decision-making.

As a result, the report recommends that the hub should initially focus on practical support: helping people find existing resources, connecting them with networks, and showcasing successful examples. Over time, this can contribute to a broader shift where participation is increasingly seen as a normal and valuable part of governance.

2. Strengthened supply

A lot of our interviewees discussed the challenges they face as organisations building participation technology.

We heard that key barriers include procurement requirements, certification costs, and uncertainty around sustainable business models. The tensions between open vs closed source tech in the current market came up regularly, but we’ve tried to take a balanced approach.

Rather than treating open and closed source approaches as a binary choice, we think the hub can support a diverse ecosystem while reducing barriers to openness, collaboration and interoperability.

3. Optimised implementation

Here we’re trying to unite supply and demand.

We think there needs to be stronger links between civic tech practitioners, democratic innovators, universities and public authorities, alongside support for pilots in places where participation is less established. Longer term, we’d like the hub to explore approaches such as shared testing environments and procurement reform that would make participation technology easier to adopt and scale.

4.  Cross cutting themes

Finally, there are two cross-cutting themes that we wanted to recognise, even though they’re not central to our recommendations. 

The first is the importance of political buy-in. Successful participation processes require political leaders who are willing to engage with the outcomes, whatever they may be. The second is the growing impact of AI. Interviewees highlighted both the opportunities AI creates for participation technology and the new challenges it poses around regulation, platform governance and digital infrastructure. 

In summary

Overall, our conclusion is that the most valuable role for a European civic tech hub is to reduce friction across the ecosystem: helping authorities find trusted resources, supporting organisations to navigate barriers, sharing evidence of what works, and creating the conditions for participation to become a more routine part of democratic decision-making.

Read the full report, and watch our launch event.

Any questions, comments or feedback? Get in touch tictec@mysociety.org

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Photo by and machines on Unsplash

Whether or not you voted, or no matter who you voted for, every person in Wales is now represented by six MSs in the Senedd. 

And the good news is, we’re here to help you navigate the new system!

✉️ You can find out who your six MSs are, and contact all or some of them, through WriteToThem.

🔔 Want to follow what they’re up to? The new MSs have been loaded into TheyWorkForYou, so you can also set up alerts to receive an email any time they speak, or whenever a topic you care about is mentioned in the Senedd. 

📊 If you use constituency data based on postcodes in your work, you can easily convert it using our new tool — more about this below. 

✉️  Find and write to your representatives in seconds

Just enter your postcode in WriteToThem and we’ll show you:

• your six MSs
• your MP
• your local councillors

From there, you can send a message directly through the site. 

PS: We’ve been funded by the Welsh Government to make improvements to WriteToThem: more news on that soon!

📊 A brand new postcode converter tool

With new constituencies having been created across Scotland and Wales, organisations will find that any postcode data they used to depend on to map their supporters to representatives is now out of date. Happily, we can help. 

Enter your postcode into our online tool and it’ll give you a simple copy-and-pastable output you can plug right into your spreadsheet. 

🔔 Democracy doesn’t stop on election night

Elections matter, but democracy is also what happens in between them. TheyWorkForYou covers the Senedd in English and Welsh, so you can keep track of what is happening locally on the issues you care about.

We’ll send you alerts directly to your inbox, and we’ve upgraded the customisation functions recently! Need some more help? Here’s our guidance page.

In a recent blog post, we set out why proposals to reduce the Freedom of Information cost limit would reduce government transparency, without meaningfully reducing the burden on public authorities, since then the opposition to the move has grown. 

What’s the problem?

On 18 March 2026, The Financial Times reported that the government is considering lowering the cost limit for FOI (and therefore increasing the amount of FOI requests that can be rejected). The justification given for this is rising request volumes,  financial pressure on departmental budgets, and a mooted national security question (paywalled link).

What people are saying

Across our FOI network and beyond, these arguments have been widely challenged. In his initial blog post, journalist George Greenwood argues that the risks being cited are already well understood and already addressed within existing FOI exemptions. He goes further in the Times (paywalled), describing the proposals as a “democratic retreat” that would make it harder to uncover government wrongdoing and major public scandals. 

Looking at the cost argument, Jenna Corderoy’s piece for Democracy for Sale highlights how departments have spent significant sums fighting FOI requests in tribunal, often unsuccessfully. This shows that some of the highest costs of the FOI system are not just from processing requests, but are the result of  departmental decisions to resist disclosure in the first place.

Claire Miller’s #FOIFriday roundup questions whether FOI admin costs are significant in the context of overall public spending, and highlights evidence that lowering cost limits is unlikely to reduce overall workload. Instead, Claire points to the role of internal reviews, complaints, and inefficient handling as key drivers of cost, and emphasises the benefits of proactive publication and better systems.

Editorial and institutional voices have also weighed in. A Sunday Times editorial (paywalled) frames the proposals as part of a broader pattern of excessive government secrecy, warning that lowering the cost limit would create a “serious democratic deficit”. The Society of Editors has similarly warned that restricting FOI would damage press freedom and make it harder for journalists to hold power to account.

Sector-specific responses highlight the wider impact. The Committee for Academic Freedom have written that lowering the cost limit would disproportionately affect complex, investigative requests, and in a university setting transparency is already hard-won, so scrutiny efforts should be supported, not diminished. The Press Gazette has argued that reducing the cost limit would put public interest information “beyond scrutiny”.

The story has reached elected representatives too: last week local councillors in North Yorkshire raised concerns about how a possible cost limit reduction would negatively impact local government transparency.

What are the real problems, and where can solutions be found?

The current debate reflects real pressures within the system, but the response from across the FOI community and beyond is clear that restricting access to information is not the answer. 

If the aim is to reduce cost and pressure, there are better ways to do it. Efforts to reduce access to information risk introducing larger costs elsewhere, including from inefficiency, poor decision-making, and reduced public trust. Better proactive disclosure from authorities will mean fewer requests need to be made, and fewer fights at tribunal level would save the government money. 

Transparency is not a “nice to have” that can be scaled back when budgets are tight.  It is an essential component of public services that work in the public interest. Governments that think they cannot afford transparency will be surprised at the corruption and inefficiency they will need to afford in its absence.

We’ll be continuing to write and campaign on this issue, make sure you’re signed up to our mailing list if you want to be notified of any developments. 

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

At the beginning of the year, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: to help a group of small organisations working with marginalised communities to run Freedom of Information–based campaigns using WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch-request and project features. We recruited groups working in areas as varied as domestic abuse, arts funding, youth health, SEND provision, parental leave, fuel poverty, and migrant justice. 

As the year draws to a close, we’re reflecting on the project and the lessons we’ve learned from it. It’s been a total privilege working closely with these organisations, because it gave us a front-row view of the real challenges of frontline campaigning and community support. 

What became clear early on was that the hardest part of a batch-request project isn’t actually pressing “send”.  Campaigners know their issues intimately, but FOI requires a specific kind of precision: pinning down exactly what data will answer their question, what format it should be in, and which public bodies actually hold it. Moving from “we want to understand this issue” to “we need these five questions answered from these 150 authorities” is a surprisingly big leap. 

Luckily, WhatDoTheyKnow’s knowledgeable  volunteers were able to help our groups go from vague policy areas to precise questions, and to understand what information was already out there. One of our groups didn’t end up submitting a big batch request, as in the course of their preparatory research they found an already-published dataset from an industry body they didn’t know existed. This is still a win — proactive publication by authorities makes everyone’s life easier.

In the cases where we had good questions and had identified the right authorities, we then still had to tackle the practical reality: for small teams already stretched thin, a large FOI project which asks a lot of questions requires capacity to deal with the answers. These can come in a diversity of forms: follow-ups, clarifications, refusals, delays, internal reviews. Our Projects tool helps to make dealing with the range of responses easier, but the scale of the challenge can still require serious commitment of time and resources. Zarino shared his experience of this on our blog back in October.

Just this week we had a moment that illustrates this: one of the groups we were supporting sent a batch FOI request to 133 universities on 5 July. As I write this in December, they are still receiving responses. The most recent one, a refusal, arrived five months after the original request! 

We’ve got two strands of thought here. On one hand, it’s good to be realistic. Although these moments are frustrating, they also teach us to be prepared for slow, unpredictable timelines, and that persistence is part of the craft. On the other hand, we feel strongly that citizens shouldn’t have to be quite so persistent, that pace shouldn’t be quite so slow, nor unpredictable. That’s why we’re advocating for upstream policy improvements, such as in our recent evidence to the Scottish Parliament, and in our upcoming FOI Fest conference.

Although it’s not always been straightforward, this year reinforced why FOI is worth the effort. A particularly strong example came from SCALP and Netpol’s From Scotland to Gaza report, which, with our help, used batch FOI requests to uncover policing practices around protests. Their methodical approach combined data from public bodies with testimonies to make a compelling case that has shaped media coverage and public debate. It’s a reminder that FOI doesn’t just extract information, it empowers communities to speak with confidence.

All of this left us with a clearer sense of what we can do in future to help make big FOI projects work. A few lessons stood out:

• Start smaller: a 10-authority pilot builds confidence and tests the strength of the question.
• Co-design the requests: working together on wording and structure reduces uncertainty: the organisations have expertise of their area, while our volunteers have second-to-none understanding of how to write a clear request.
• Prepare organisations for the long tail: follow-ups, delays, and refusals are, unfortunately, to be expected, not signs of failure of the project. 
• Volunteers can help with the volume of work: Climate Emergency UK have set the standard for how to train, empower and mobilise the cohorts they need to churn through large quantities of data.
• See FOI as a strategic, not administrative tool: it’s most useful when tied directly to campaign goals.

We fundamentally believe that every organisation can benefit from FOI; they just need the right scaffolding and resources. If you know what you’re in for, the whole process becomes far less intimidating.

What next? We’re refining our approach, watching what happens with our initial batch of projects, and constantly updating our guides and help pages to support our users in their big and small FOI projects. Every request is a small act of collective muscle-building. We’re excited to keep learning and keep improving the support that makes those acts possible.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

The UK has two Freedom of Information laws – one that covers Scottish public authorities and one that covers public authorities in the rest of the UK. While similar to the UK law in many respects, we think there are a number of practical ways the Scottish system improves on the wider system of FOI in the UK. 

While being better than the UK law is a good start, our sights should be set a lot higher than that: Freedom of Information needs to keep pace with how the world has changed, the changing ways public services are delivered, and huge shifts in how information can be stored and shared. 

Currently there is a Private Member’s Bill going through the Scottish Parliament with a combination of practical fix-ups to problems that have emerged, and bigger picture changes to encourage better proactive publication of information.

Last month, the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee invited views on the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill, which aims to modernise and strengthen the existing law. Our submission welcomed the Bill as a timely and proportionate improvement to an already effective system.

In addition to our written evidence, we were delighted to be invited to give oral evidence to the committee. You can watch Alex’s evidence session here.

Overall we’re really supportive of this effort to update the FOI system in Scotland, and as Alex said to the committee, we’re especially pleased to see proposals for a new proactive publication duty. 

This change would help public bodies make information available as a matter of course, reducing the need for requests and ensuring that information, once released, is accessible to everyone. In our research on fragmented public data, we’ve shown how better coordination and consistent publication practices can unlock huge public value. The Bill’s provisions around proactive publication are a welcome step towards achieving this.

This feels like a key moment for transparency enthusiasts to unite around the opportunity to make Scotland’s FOI system even better, and we’re delighted to play our part.

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Image: Chris Flexen

If you’ve ever wondered what your MP is interested in outside of their party alignment, a good place to look is All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs). These groups bring MPs and Peers from different parties together around shared policy interests. 

There’s a real range of causes, of size, and of activity. The groups don’t have formal powers, but they can be influential spaces for discussion and collaboration. This also makes them key sites for lobbying, and for money to enter Parliament. For all of these reasons, as part of our WhoFundsThem work looking into MPs’ financial interests, we’ve been digging deeper into APPGs. 

Alongside our regular output that makes it easier to compare each APPG register to the previous one, there’s now a big new update on TheyWorkForYou allowing you to browse your MP’s memberships for the first time.

Getting the lists

There is no central list of memberships of APPGs. The official Parliament register lists the four officers of each group, but not the wider membership list (each group must have at least 20 members to be constituted). Some APPGs have websites where they publish these lists, but others don’t have public membership lists at all.

Two things have changed in the last few years that made it practically possible to put together a (mostly) comprehensive membership list. 

The big one is that the rules changed so that APPGs need to either publish a membership list on their website or provide it on request. 

The second is that LLM technologies have made more flexible scrapers viable, meaning we can more easily extract membership lists published in lots of different forms on lots of different websites. 

We’ll write up the scraper in a technical blog post,  but by scraping the available websites and requesting the membership lists from the remaining groups, we’ve brought all of this information into one place. 

Theory vs practice

From our previous experiment asking APPGs for information, we knew there was a big gap between the rules that technically everyone has signed off on, and what APPG secretariats understood in practice. This is part of a wider problem where Parliament in principle has rules that in practice are just not strongly enforced. 

For this round we have done the minimal possible request: just asking for membership lists, rather than the wider range of documents we had published previously, and only when both our automated process and volunteers couldn’t find one. Despite this being a relatively clear rule, 94/236 groups didn’t respond to our request for a membership list. 

We also encountered a few groups who did not want to disclose full membership lists for security reasons due to the topic of their group being sensitive, while others were concerned that publishing names could lead to MPs being flooded with unhelpful lobbying. 

We’re sensitive to security concerns and don’t want to strongly argue the point given the small number affected (compared to the much larger number who just didn’t reply), but also there is currently no exemption in the APPG rules for security reasons. If Parliament wants this to be the case, the rules need to be updated to specify the conditions for this exemption from wider transparency.

We will be writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner to report this reasonably high level of non-compliance with transparency requirements of the APPG rules. 

What we discovered

Using the scraper, supported by volunteers’ work, we found memberships for 205 groups online. 

We contacted the remaining groups by email to ask for their membership lists. 140 gave us their membership information, two were in touch but declined to give their lists, and 94 did not respond.

Of the groups we have data for, we found:

• 615 MPs (94%) belong to at least one APPG. Only 35 MPs don’t take part in any at all. This list largely maps onto government ministers, who are not permitted to be a member of an APPG.
• On average, MPs are members of around 10 APPGs.
• Half of MPs are in at least 8 groups, and some are far more active: one MP is listed as belonging to 63 APPGs.

You can view and download the full dataset. 

We also discovered some interesting features about APPGs’ wider memberships  — and that the definition of membership varies between groups. The Guide to Rules states “A member is one who has asked to be on the group’s Membership List” but interpretations of this varied quite extensively. This was especially true about “non-parliamentary membership” (people and organisations affiliated with the APPG, who can be charged for memberships).  Some groups noted that this would include mailing lists with hundreds of individuals so would not share them, while others sent lists of ‘donors’, not all of whom were previously public as they did not meet Parliament’s £1,500 declaration threshold. 

Why it matters

APPG memberships can show what issues MPs care about, and where they might be working across party lines. This matters because of transparency; it’s useful for constituents to know where their MP is spending time and building networks, but also for relationship-building. We think this information can be key to foster common ground both between MPs themselves and between MPs and constituents. 

Explore for yourself

Find your MP’s page on TheyWorkForYou.com or to see their APPG memberships or download the whole dataset. You can also browse this data on the Local Intelligence Hub. Over time, we will make this available on a page per APPG. 

While you’re there, you may spot a few more new features. Join Alex and I on Thursday 23 October for a chatty catch-up on new features, plans for the site, and our vision of a more open Parliament. 

Note: If you are an MP, or on their staff, and our entry is either missing or has incorrect information, you can report issues on this form. 

Photo by Jani Kaasinen on Unsplash

Partners across the Access to Information Community of Practice have been hard at work this summer. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to, and book your tickets for our exciting new webinar!

At mySociety, we’ve had a packed few months: in May we kicked off a new three-part webinar series on the practical applications of ATI, focusing on climate. We introduced new WDTK Learn pages, and in June we were thrilled to host so many organisations at TICTeC and our ATI day. All of the sessions from TICTeC are now available to watch on YouTube: I’d definitely recommend checking out network members Marzena, Liset and Krisztina‘s sessions. 

In July, we were lucky enough to attend the International Conference of Information Commissioners (ICIC) in Berlin.  This year’s event brought together around 200 participants from 85 countries and, for the first time, featured a civil society day alongside the commissioners’ closed sessions — resulting in a civil society declaration. 

The conversations throughout the week reinforced many of the themes raised during our ATI day, including the tension between privacy rights and transparency, the shrinking civic space in some regions, and the growing need for civil society to support embattled Information Commissioners. The conference sparked new connections and revived old ones, and it left us thinking ambitiously about where the network could go next!

Speaking of the network, how about some more updates:

In Poland, Citizens’ Network Watchdog has been active on many fronts: working with partners on anti-SLAPP and AI governance; influencing policy to protect NGOs’ access to courts; continuing legal advocacy around contract transparency and government surveillance; and successfully engaging communities through podcasts, roadshows and court wins. They’ve also raised concerns about Poland’s absence from the newly launched European Network for Transparency and Right to Information (ENTRI).

In the Netherlands, SPOON and Access Info Europe collaborated to publish legal recommendations for strengthening the Open Government Act (OGA), aligning it more closely with international standards. These were shared with government, oversight bodies, and the Council of Europe’s Access Info Group. Across Europe, Access Info also just announced the second winner of the Helen Darbishire Award, congrats to The Forever Lobbying Project!

Meanwhile, Ma Dada in France continues to serve its growing community despite funding challenges. While operational work is paused, the site recently passed 2,000 users and hit 50,000 requests – a clear sign of continued demand. mySociety and MaDada are making great progress on some GDPR technical work as a result of a successful bid to NLNet.

In Croatia, Gong has wrapped up a national workshop tour and launched a social media campaign to boost ATI awareness via ImamoPravoZnati. They’ve also been testing the ATI law’s strength by filing requests and complaints around the recent local elections.

What’s next?

Whether through litigation, policy, storytelling or platform-building, it’s inspiring to see the range and reach of our collective efforts across Europe and beyond! The inspiration doesn’t stop there: please join us on Tuesday 19th August for our next FOI in practice webinar, this time focussing on the topic everyone is talking about – AI! We’ve got three great speakers and we’d love to see you there. 

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Photo by Audrius Sutkus on Unsplash

In May, SPOON hosted a thought-provoking salon for our ATI network exploring the Dutch access to information framework and the wider European movement for legal reform of access to information rights. The event brought together experts and advocates, including Liset Hamming and Tim Staal, co-founders and executive directors of SPOON, and Rachel Hanna, Executive Director of Access Info. Together, they discussed the state of transparency laws in the Netherlands, the country’s role in international access to information efforts, and how civil society can push for meaningful improvements.

Setting the Scene: A New Law, a New Opportunity

The Netherlands introduced a new freedom of information law—the Wet Open Overheid (WOO)—in May 2022, replacing the previous legislation from the 1980s. SPOON was founded just months later in October 2022 to help journalists, NGOs, and citizens navigate the new law, and to advocate for better implementation and reform where needed.

According to Liset and Tim, the Netherlands has seen a surge of interest in FOI requests since the WOO was introduced, particularly among journalists. Many media reports now begin by explicitly citing information obtained through WOO requests. Yet while the new law looks strong on paper, SPOON’s work quickly revealed ongoing challenges with how it functions in practice.

Partnering for Impact: The Role of Access Info

SPOON’s partnership with Access Info has been key to its strategy. Rachel Hanna opened the salon by explaining how Access Info uses a standard methodology—based on the Tromsø Convention and international right to information (RTI) benchmarks—to assess the quality of transparency laws. This enables consistent evaluations across countries, scored out of 300 points.

Rachel outlined Access Info’s current comparative campaign across four countries—France, Greece, Moldova, and the Netherlands—each selected for its unique legal and political context. In the Netherlands, the existence of a new law presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Although the Dutch government has not signed the Tromsø Convention, the law mandates a review within six years—offering a window to influence improvements.

Legal Gaps and Practical Problems

Tim delved into the specifics of the Dutch system. While the Netherlands was once a global leader in transparency laws, it now lags behind in some respects. The new WOO law, despite its promise, remains nearly 80% identical to the old law. Key mechanisms such as a central document register and an independent information commissioner were left out—omissions that have become more apparent as implementation issues pile up.

The government in the Netherlands is talking about a 2027 refresh, which could be an opportunity for improvements, but there are concerns that calls for reform could backfire, leading to a narrowing rather than an expansion of rights—particularly given the current political climate of distrust and civil service resistance.

Tim highlighted how the lack of a central document register leads to overly broad requests from users, which in turn burden government departments. SPOON’s solution is to work closely with users to narrow and clarify their requests, helping to make the system work despite its flaws.

Bridging the Gap Between Law and Practice

A recurring theme was the tension between legal rights and practical realities. Rachel stressed that even a well-drafted law can fall short if poorly implemented. That’s why Access Info’s recommendations focus not just on alignment with the Tromsø Convention, but on the creation of tools and institutions—like an information commissioner—that can help bridge this gap.

In the Netherlands, judicial routes are available, but they are slow and burdensome. An ombudsperson can sometimes act more swiftly, but this depends heavily on the individual’s approach. An independent commissioner would offer faster and more consistent oversight.

Next Steps: Dialogue and Evaluation

Looking ahead, SPOON and Access Info are focused on fostering dialogue with government officials ahead of the WOO law’s formal evaluation. This includes creating a dedicated platform to engage civil servants in practical discussions on transparency, implementation challenges, and ways forward. A key goal is to ensure that civil society has a seat at the table when the law is reviewed—and to push for evidence-based, internationally-aligned improvements.

The salon highlighted a “perfect storm” moment: an emerging international consensus on best practices, a recently reformed national law, and a Dutch government that, while cautious, remains open to conversation. With the right approach, this moment could be the launchpad for meaningful reform—not just in the Netherlands, but as part of a broader European movement for open government.

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Photo by Paul Einerhand on Unsplash

We’ve built a tool that helps us release a lot more useful information about All Party Parliamentary Groups, but we need humans to help us with membership lists. 

The new stuff

For each new APPG register (which are released approximately every six weeks), we now produce lists of new APPGs, removed APPGs and updated APPGs.

• New and removed APPGs

In the latest edition of the register (published 7 May) there were 32 new APPGs added, including Wine of Great Britain, Snooker and Hadrian’s Wall! In this edition, no APPGs were removed. 

That means the total number of APPGs now stands at 482, which is roughly the same as this time last year (535 in 13 May 2024 register). However, the total remains significantly lower than the 722 figure from March 2024 (the final register before new rules were introduced).

• Changes to APPG web pages

One of the tricky things about keeping track of APPGs is spotting what has changed. Who received money, which secretariats have new staff, which officers have resigned or changed? Our new tool does that for you. Here’s what we found when we compared the newest edition with the previous one:

• Several APPGs have lost an officer leaving them with only three officers, one short of the number required, according to the rules. In the case of the Pro-Life and the SME Housebuilders groups, this has also left the groups in breach of the requirement to have an officer from both the Government and Opposition parties. 
• Some groups have new organisations acting as their secretariats, whilst others have had changes to the people who are the public enquiry point at their secretariat. Devo Agency now provides secretariat services to four groups- Liverpool City Region, North East, Greater Manchester and Northern Culture. 
• Income: More than £70,000 of new financial benefits have been declared in this register, including £20,000 to the Engineering Group and £35,000 to the Environment Group.

As with the Register of Members’ Financial Interests part of this project, we’re coming up against two big problems: bad data and Parliament not enforcing its own rules. First we want complete datasets, but then we’re going to report our findings on the quality of this data. 

Over to you: help us with membership lists

Arguably the most important question about an APPG is: who’s in it? APPG membership lists help constituents and campaigners to understand which policy areas MPs are interested in, and they make it clearer who is benefitting from the resources given to groups as a whole. However, membership lists are not routinely made available.

The APPG pages on the Parliament site list the four officers, but not the wider membership. For a group to be established, it must have at least 20 members – so there’s at least 16 names we’re missing per group.

By the new rules, we should be able to ask for this information. But if groups publish their membership lists on their website, they don’t need to respond to our requests. If they don’t have a website or don’t publish their membership lists, then they do have to tell us.

So we need to a) find all the APPG websites, and b) see if they publish members lists before we can then C) ask the ones without published lists to send them to us.

Alex has built a tool which has got us most of the way there, but we need human brains to check.

We want to find out:

1. Are there websites we haven’t found?
2. Are there membership lists we haven’t found?

Right – over to you!

1. Open up the spreadsheet.
2. Choose a group, then click the link in column D (google_link), which sends you to a Google search result for the name of that group. We’re looking for independent websites run by the APPGs, not the listing on the Parliament page and not the listing on parallelparliament.co.uk.
3. If there is a website for that group, paste the URL of the website into column E (appg_website). For some groups we have found the website already, but we need you to do the next steps. 
4. If there’s no APPG website, please enter NONE for column E and column F (appg_members_page).
5. If there is an APPG website, the next thing we’re looking for is a membership list. If you can find one, enter the URL into column F. If you can’t find any membership info, enter NONE.
6. When you’ve finished, put ‘done’ in column G (review_status) and your initials in column I (reviewer_initials)

Thanks so much – this really does make a difference! No time but still want to help? Please consider donating so we can do more of this work. 

Photo by Frank on Unsplash