The EIR is a similar set of rights to those we have under Freedom of Information, but specifically give access to environmental information held by public authorities.

Those who remember reading about the sewagemaps project in our blog post of last April will recall that the discharge of sewage falls firmly under the category of environmental information — and may be interested to see an update from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) celebrating an increased an “open by default” culture from the nation’s water companies:

“All of the water companies we wrote to have now committed to proactively publishing information relating to start and stop times of sewage discharges.”

This follows an intervention to water companies from the ICO, reflecting the national mood around sewage discharges, and is a good example of how their regulatory powers can be applied. 

“All water companies across the UK have a legal obligation to make information about the environment available under the EIR and are required to both respond to requests for environmental information and to make information available proactively.”

That initial ICO post explained that they had issued six water companies with decision notices requiring them to disclose the start and stop time of sewage discharges, and contacted all 12 CEOs of companies responsible for sewage services to “clearly set out our expectations that [discharge data] should be made available to the public.”

Our own blog post on the sewagemaps.co.uk project has been one of our most read and discussed this year, so we know it’s a topic our followers feel passionate about — a sentiment that’s in line with the nation as a whole. So we were keen to know more, and Deborah Clark at the ICO was happy to oblige.

What was the catalyst for this activity around sewage discharges?

“It was sparked by an increase in complaints we received about water companies and a series of decision notices we issued requiring disclosure of the start and stop time of discharges. This May 2024 document was the first of many decisions where we made our position clear that such information needed to be disclosed.”

Warren Seddon, Director of FOI at the ICO, described the steps you had to take in respect to one particular noncompliant water company — what did that entail?

“We specifically directed United Utilities to proactively publish frequently requested information, which includes historic data on sewage discharges, and to include it in its disclosure log. This was the first Practice Recommendation we have issued under the Code of Practice issued under regulation 16 of the EIR.”

And he also mentioned that you’re working with reluctant companies to show them how to achieve best practice in data publication.

“Yes — we asked the other water and sewage companies to publish the data in the interests of transparency. Here’s the relevant extract from the letters we sent:

In addition to providing timely and appropriate responses to requests for such environmental information, I strongly encourage you to proactively disclose appropriate information relating to sewage discharges on a regular, monthly basis. This proactive and timely publication of the information would not only provide this important information to the public more quickly and easily, but would also be more cost effective and efficient than dealing with the alternative of numerous responses to individual requests for the information.

How much power does the ICO have in this regard?

“This positive change was achieved through engagement rather than formal and specific regulatory action. Water companies are not required by law to publish monthly data.

“We are currently looking at what regulatory activity we can do to better support proactive disclosure provision at Regulation 4 of EIR [“The EIR require authorities to proactively make environmental information that they hold available to the public by electronic means”], but this work is at an early stage — so watch this space.”

Do you have any further advice for people who are frustrated by the sewage discharges they’re seeing in local rivers and beaches? What can they do, or should they be hopeful for change in the future as a result of this increased transparency from the water companies?

“Water companies are a lot more transparent now than they were a few years ago. We will continue to take an interest in this space and we’re involved in an EIR forum for water companies where we encourage proactive publication so this increased transparency should continue. 

“At the ICO we’re concerned only with information rights, so that’s where we’re able to give advice; as a start, where possible check publication schemes and disclosure logs for relevant published information before making a request.”

Thanks very much to Deborah for taking the time to talk to us. If you’re interested in obtaining environmental information from public bodies, you should know that you can submit EIRs as well as FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow – there’s more about that here.

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Image: Mark McNeill

Our website WriteToThem helps you contact your elected representatives, quickly and simply. In a recent blog post, we explained that we’ve added a Welsh translation across the site, and made it easier to navigate recent changes to the Senedd.

And while those improvements clearly have a great benefit for residents of Wales, the work has also introduced a couple of features that will help all users of WriteToThem, no matter where they are in the UK.

1. Extra help in getting the right message to the right place

If you live in an area with a devolved parliament, you have a lot of politicians representing you: not just your local councillors and an MP; but also Members of your nation’s parliament. For anyone deciding to make contact with a representative for the first time, this can be bewildering — who’s the right person for your specific message?

And to be fair, it’s not always straightforward even for those living elsewhere in the UK. For example, you might have both district and county councillors: do you know the difference? Likely not unless you’re a real democracy maven.  

More people representing you might be a good thing, but when it comes to an individual wondering who best to contact about, say, bin collection, housing issues or the state pension, faced with a long list of potential recipients, it’s easy to just give up.

So how are we helping with that?

Once you’ve entered your postcode on WriteToThem’s homepage, the site displays a list of all the representatives you can write to, from councillors right up to Lords.

If you’re not sure which category of representative is right for your issue, there’s some brief guidance on the left of the page, explaining the top level of issues each is responsible for.

For more information, you can click “Not sure who to contact?” at the top of the page. By default, this takes you to an information page giving more information about every type of representative; but, as you’ve already input your postcode at this stage, it will only show you the information relevant to the representatives covering your area. 

You can see this for yourself if you replace the postcode at the end of this url with your own: https://www.writetothem.com/about-yourrep?pc=LA1+2ES.

For those using the Welsh site, this guidance is also, of course, available in Welsh.

Watch this space, as we also plan to introduce help for those who are looking at a list of representatives within the same category (eg, several councillors or Assembly Members), and wondering how to choose which of them to contact.

2. A simple way for campaigns to mobilise their supporters

Are you working for a cause and want politicians to know about it?

Ever since its launch back in 2005, WriteToThem has been a useful (and completely free) tool for campaigners on a low budget. All you need to do is direct your supporters to the site and encourage them to get in touch with their representative/s.

If that sounds helpful, take a look at our guidance, which we’ve recently refreshed.

Even better, we’ve updated the code that lets you put a professional-looking widget on your site. This looks a lot smarter than just a plain link, and you don’t need to have design or development skills — just copy the html and put it on your web page. 

We know that a lot of organisations don’t use WriteToThem to send messages: for them, the most useful part is being able to help their clients see who their representatives are, so there’s also the option to amend the widget so it says “find out who represents you”.

This widget can also be set up so that it toggles between English and Welsh, with your choice of what appears as the default.

There’s something else useful for campaigns, too: if you have a database of your supporters, including information such as their postcodes, you can make the path even smoother by sending a personalised link that saves them one or more steps in the email-writing process.

For example, if you know which type of representative you want them to contact, you can skip the screen where they have to select that; if you know their address, you can pre-fill those fields for them; and if you have their postcodes on file, you can take them directly to the letter-composing screen. 

Finally, we’ve added information about building big impact locally, and evidence-informed campaigning, making use of some of the other free websites we run.

All of this is explained in more detail in our guidance, so if it sounds helpful, do take a look!

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Image: Dinah Makhmutova

The democratic landscape in Wales has changed… and so has our ‘contact your politician’ website WriteToThem.

In a webinar today, we invited Jess Blair from ERS Cymru to talk through how the Senedd looks, how the power balance has shifted and how that affects those living in Wales.

Now that each Welsh resident has several representatives, including councillors, MSs and an MP, deciding which one to contact is not necessarily a straightforward question! So, after Jess had spoken, mySociety’s Alex explained the changes we’ve made to WriteToThem to help our users get the right message to the right place.

Oh, and one more thing: did we mention WriteToThem also now has a Welsh translation? You can navigate the site in Welsh, and, if you wish, email your representatives in Welsh too. This work has been made possible thanks to the Welsh Government’s Democratic Engagement Grant.

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Image: Nazarii Taran

The effects of AI are making themselves known across every sector, and Freedom of Information is no exception. 

AI has lowered the bar to making contact, in every place where citizens interact with public authorities, from making pothole reports to submitting FOI requests. 

On the face of it, this is a good thing for individuals — after all, mySociety was founded on the principle that digital processes should make it easier for people to interact with government — but this sudden and disruptive uptick in communication has created an increased burden for those authorities*.

At FOI Fest, Scottish FOI Commissioner David Hamilton told us that they’re experiencing unprecedented levels of requests, due to a number of factors, but certainly in part because people are using AI — and as he explained, these requests bring their own specific types of challenges.

Now the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, the ICO, has addressed this new reality by including advice around using AI in their wider guidelines for making an effective request (which also, we’re glad to see, point people towards WhatDoTheyKnow).

What’s the problem?

Generative AI tends to add more complex and unnecessary wording, can provide inaccurate information and will sometimes ‘hallucinate’ (provide inaccurate information). All of these factors mean that authorities are having to spend more time corresponding with request-makers to pin down what they meant to ask for.

While it need not be, FOI can already sometimes be a long process, and this only adds to the time taken (when an authority needs to ask for clarification, it restarts the clock on the 20 working days within which they are required to provide a response).

Plus, if you end up needing to make a complaint about the way your request has been handled, the ICO notes that complex and inaccurate requests make it much harder for them to help you.

What you need to know

The commissioners’ offices are not saying that AI should never be used to write an FOI request or appeal; simply that if you do so, you should proceed with due caution. They suggest:

• Checking that AI hasn’t changed the scope of what you have asked for, and that you are asking for precisely — and only — the information you require.
• Ensuring that your request is clear, concise and focused. 
• Checking the facts: don’t assume AI “knows” which law applies or which authority is the suitable recipient for your request.
• Ensuring the tone is appropriate. 

In many ways, this is the same advice we’d apply for request-makers who are using their own brains, as well. Either way, it’s always worth getting it right, and making things as easy for yourself, and our public authorities, as possible.

 *Although, NB that the jury is still out on whether AI is the direct cause of this: see, for example, this story from Australia.

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Image [amended to include ‘Make an FOI request’ button]: Zulfugar Karimov

With all the fuss about Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister, it may be easy to forget that he’s been in Parliament before — as an MP.

That means that he already had a page on TheyWorkForYou, our website that makes Parliament easier to follow. And, as Burnham originally entered the House in 2001 and didn’t step down until 2017, there’s a lot to explore.

That includes his voting record during that time*.

You can also search Andy Burnham’s speeches, or browse the interests he declared. Of course, all these pages will quickly fill up with new content now that Burnham is Prime Minister.

Follow what Andy Burnham gets up to

There’s an easy way to keep up to date with everything that Burnham does in Parliament: click the ‘get email updates’ button at the top of his TheyWorkForYou page, and we’ll send an email when he speaks or votes. This is a free service.

One thing to note: as he’s now PM, that’s likely to be quite a lot of emails. So, if you want to focus only on the bits that interest you, set up a more refined alert.

Perhaps you’d like to hear only when he mentions football, railways, wildlife…or anything else you have an interest in. The possibilities are genuinely endless — you can subscribe to as many keywords or phrases as you like.

Here’s how:

• Go to theyworkforyou.com/alert and click the green button marked ‘create new keyword alert’.

• Put your chosen keyword/s into the first field.

• In the field marked ‘Would you like to only alert when a particular person speaks?’, type ‘Andy Burnham’.

That’s it! Now you can sit back and wait for the emails to come in. If you ever want to make any changes, you just need to return to the Alerts page. There’s lots more information about managing your alerts, and different types of alert, on this page.

Not interested in Burnham? You can do the same with any MP or member of a devolved parliament.

We do the work — so you can understand Parliament more easily

Collating voting summaries, sending you email alerts, making debates searchable: we do all this in the name of making Parliament more accessible to everyone.

If you think that’s worthwhile, please do donate so we can keep working to open up democracy. Thank you.

*Browsing Burnham’s voting record? You’ll find that a new feature we’ve added recently is very useful here: click on the little cross next to where it says “For period” and you can choose to see votes from a specific parliament, or for all time.

Image: House of Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

For the the third in our series of discovery workshops, we invited people working with FOI in public authorities to discuss how a network might support them — and we had more than 50 attendees joining us from a range of organisations and specialities. 

Discussion was lively and informative, with many expressing a thirst for community and knowledge-sharing in their roles.

We began with a group brainstorming session to discuss the challenges and obstacles people were facing in their work with FOI. 

From this, we pulled out the four major groupings below, so that smaller breakout groups could discuss what attempts had been made previously to mitigate these challenges, how effective these had been, and what an FOI Network could do to help.

Volume/complexity of requests

The increasing volume of FOI requests being received (a challenge which overlaps with that of the lack of resources, below) came up as a common issue, especially in conjunction with the increasing use of AI to generate requests. 

Here, there are two concerns: that AI is leading to more complex (if not necessarily more effective) requests; and that there is potential for a deliberate, malicious use of AI-generated FOI requests that might overwhelm an authority without their necessarily being aware of it. 

AI-generated/assisted requests are hard to formally recognise (although many are developing a ‘gut feeling’ around them), but also not inherently illegitimate. The group discussed tactics such as asking for clarification or ID, to flush out potentially inauthentic requests if suspected. A participant from the ICO also shared their recent AI guidance.

What could an FOI Network contribute here? Convening people was seen as useful in helping to understand patterns and themes between authorities, and shared approaches. This might take the form of directly organised networking activity, or supporting and promoting the informal networks that already exist. 

Building centralised resources might also help in creating tools for assessing thresholds of vexatiousness, while also providing better assistance to requesters on what good and bad degrees of complexity looks like in an FOI request. 

Locating information

Finding the information that is being requested is at the very heart of what an FOI officer does  — and can present a sizable challenge, especially where data is not collected or stored consistently. 

Discussion touched on issues around record keeping, proactive publication, resource and support from colleagues in sourcing/collecting  information: while the officer is the entry point for requests for information, they most likely hold little of it themselves. 

The amount of resource, support and priority is given to record keeping and FOI across the organisation affects how effective an officer can be. 

Information can only be easily accessed if it is stored well: some participants talked about requests for data that is not currently centrally held, but which requesters argue should be, leading to antagonistic interactions, despite the Information Officer not being to blame. 

Participants talked both about resourcing conflicts where other priorities were legitimately higher (eg “The information holders are clinical staff (NHS) and trying to get them to answer FOI requests when they are busy with patients is not reasonable”); but also situations where requests not taken seriously by senior teams, or other departments were slow to engage with them. 

As such, a key challenge for information officers is navigating both the formal and relational structures of their organisation, and a key challenge for an FOI Network is finding ways to support this role in developing a culture of transparency and good record keeping practice.

Part of this fits with our theory that good FOI statistics are an important factor in empowering information officers — because this visibility would make FOI performance between organisations more salient, and so a greater concern for senior decision-makers. 

Lack of resources

This group discussed the lack of resources, staffing and slashed funding — including elsewhere in the organisation, where diminished budgets can remove the institutional knowledge and capacity to effectively find information.

This was another area where there was great enthusiasm for better connections between officers across organisations, especially for the small, isolated teams. This would allow all to benefit from the knowledge of a wider group. 

For a longer-term fix to the lack of resources, a united network could lobby to central government. This isn’t just about “more money”, but the effective production of centralised resources that would help everyone (eg software, tools and licences). 

It was noted that redaction was a problem that was significantly time consuming, and available redaction tools (like Adobe Pro) were expensive and had limited licences. 

Proactive publication was also identified as a resourcing issue: in repeated requests for hot topics; but also in that publishing information can lead to more requests asking for specifics. 

From our point of view running WhatDoTheyKnow, this should still mean a greater public benefit from the information provided (people who wouldn’t ask for it have access to it), but does caution against an easy “publish more, request numbers decrease” approach — which does not align with the experience of practitioners. 

Working with requesters

This group discussed complaints resulting from a requester not knowing how to navigate the FOI system or complaints processes, and thoughts on more effective communication. A lack of requester awareness that the FOI route is not the same as the complaint route was identified, as well as public confusion between FOI and data subject rights. 

There is recognition that the requester doesn’t always know what information is available, which can lead to complex initial requests. But there was also a reported increase in adversarial/angry complaints, with a perception from request-makers that information was being denied when in didn’t exist. Where people are making requests across multiple authorities, getting refusals from some but not from others, can lead to this impression, while actually just reflecting differences in what data is collected. 

Better information and signposting about how to make a good FOI request was considered helpful, but within limits. Improved web forms can be helpful, but are not the only route in. At the same time, from a volume and overload point of view, a concern that greater awareness of the act might lead to more requests. This makes it important to define what we’re after as a network that can reconcile both a civil society “it’s good if more people are aware of and use their rights” with the practicalities of make that right real, which includes understanding of capacity.

In general, a lot of the potential in this area is around helping those making, and those answering requests to understand each other, or at least understanding more about how things work behind the scenes. 

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Finally, there was a more general discussion about forms a network can take, including the difficulty of convening both requesters and practitioners. Creating spaces for authority-side practitioners to talk helps with the smooth functioning of the FOI Act; these spaces would be more hesitant if always shared with civil society groups (and vice versa). 

We want to find ways to bridge these groups, while recognising that both individually can be constructive.  We need a set of layered discussions about how to make FOI work in practice, that can manage both communities of practice, also bridging both sides — recognising where common frustrations and collective goals can be served through better communication and coordination. This is inherently going to be complex, but will be so worthwhile to explore. 

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Illustration: Alghozy

We continue with exploratory work that will help shape what the FOI Network will become, and how it will best serve specific types of those who use Freedom Of Information. Last week, in our second workshop of three, we convened journalists and specialist users to help us understand what the barriers are to their use of FOI, and how the Network will be best positioned to help.

More than 20 people joined us, from a range of organisations and specialities. 

A group brainstorming session surfaced the challenges and obstacles that attendees face when using FOI in their work. From these, we pulled out four priority themes; then we further discussed how best to mitigate these challenges; and what an FOI network could do to help.

Themes and conclusions

Passive pushback

The phrase “passive pushback” describes a culture within authorities not of active hostility, but in which FOI requests are not processed promptly, and where transparency is neither celebrated nor prioritised. 

Participants talked about different kinds of delays and obstructions, and strategies they’d attempted to get around this, including formal approaches such as referring to relevant ICO decision notices, or working with lawyers so correspondence included their letterhead. 

Could an FOI Network support, incentivise or celebrate a culture of openness and compliance within authorities? The group discussed the importance of both carrots and sticks (or shame and envy), rewarding and highlighting good practice; and potentially putting out comparative FOI statistics to make performance more visible and easy to benchmark. 

Active pushback

Active pushback covers more explicitly obstructive behaviour, including the use of rules and processes to slow down the progress of a request (for example, the use of public interest exemptions which may later be reconsidered and overturned), and coordination between authorities (where the intention is rarely to ensure everyone is being correctly open, but more likely to be working against the spirit of the ‘applicant blind’ principle that is written into the FOI Act). 

Participants shared the methods they’d attempted in the face of such stonewalling, including complaints to the ICO, “meta requests” asking authorities about their coordination mechanisms, and naming and shaming authorities for obstruction. 

As a network, we can provide peer support and resources around such tactics, and useful responses. 

But there is also an important advocacy angle, where building evidence and lobbying to change ICO/OSIC enforcement strategies can be an important collective rather than individual counter to obstructive approaches. 

A State of FOI report could cover both the positive “culture of openness” stories, but also dig more into patterns in obstructive responses. 

Writing/managing good requests

One important issue that came up in conversation was that it is a skill to write and manage FOI requests well — one that takes time to learn. It requires both an understanding of when legal approaches are helpful, but also a sense of what is possible through Freedom of Information (where a focus on specific information that already exists is required). 

Building this expertise can be a problem if FOI skills are not already well embedded in your organisation, and you are starting effectively from scratch. 

Here, community and training would be helpful. As a newcomer takes time to build up accumulated wisdom, peer support and mentor programmes could be helpful in walking through concrete examples of where FOI can and can’t be helpful. 

Going beyond that, we discussed the concept of training products and services that could help support increasing specialist use. These might include a custom newsletter featuring FOI tricks and tips, not aimed at first time users, but for journalists and specialists. The network already includes several organisations and individuals who could provide such training and expertise — and a willing audience. Here, the value of the network would be in joining people up, rather than trying to do everything itself.

The role of technology was also discussed. It can help with the challenge of managing requests  — one peron mentioned (unprompted!) WhatDoTheyKnow Pro as helpful for tracking and extracting data. 

Some are using AI to help them refine their requests, and we discussed the potential ways we could make AI assistance lean more towards “sharper, easier to process” requests, and away from the problems, already observed, of for example where AI hallucinates ICO notices and inserts them into correspondence. Here a network could help disseminate a ‘skill’ to bring more specialist knowledge towards shaping the AI’s actions; and a network that was also inclusive of FOI practitioners could help refine that from both sides. 

Understanding/using appeal processes

The final challenges we discussed were around understanding and using the appeal processes that are built in to the FOI system, noting that there’s a strong difference between Scottish FOI and the rest of the UK: legal appeals to OSIC are rare (and only possible on points of law). 

We again talked about the value of peer support; as well as building collections in response to common pushbacks. It was acknowledged, though, that taking things to tribunal is hard, and that one can be outgunned by the representation of the public authorities. 

Here it’s important that network activity is not just support for individuals, but lobbying and campaigning for improvements to the overall appeal system. 

This might be through pressing for improved data and information such as ICO timescales, and the tribunal returning to publishing current and upcoming cases; but also through lobbying for greater funding for regulators to be able to run an effective and timely system of appeal. 

Takeaways

Thanks to all who took part in the conversation, which has helped shape our understanding of what is useful activity to support journalists and specialist users.

Practical peer support for those in smaller organisations might be especially important — but dealing properly with the issues raised also involves wider campaigning activity around making sure the overall system is functional to be able to engage with. 

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In our third workshop, we move to a focus on those working in public authorities, where we want to explore more of these questions around supporting a culture of openness, and also our common interest in improving the quality and clarity of requests. If you are an Information Officer or practitioner, please do join.

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Image: GuerillaBuzz

Liz Vango-Smith is Sustainability and Climate Change Officer at Hart District Council, where she manages the climate change programme, helping to meet their carbon reduction targets both internally, and across the district. She recently took the time to speak to us about the part that the Council Climate Action Scorecards play in her work.

Liz explained how the Scorecards are part of a wider push toward staff engagement in climate action, right across the council: “We’ve been integrating climate messaging into team briefings, running service area climate workshops, and offering carbon literacy training.

“And the Scorecards have also informed discussions at the Officers’ Working Group, a cross-council meeting with representatives from across the different service areas, including procurement, estate management, planning, waste services, street care and grounds maintenance, as well as community engagement and the natural environment.

“The combination of all of these things has helped more officers recognise they have direct roles in supporting delivery of our climate action plan.”

So where, specifically, have the Scorecards helped? “We’ve used them to highlight areas where we could improve our scores, and to focus climate action where it may not be a current focus. The published scores help provide a little more weighting to encouraging collaborative action with colleagues, as they create a level of accountability across the whole organisation to play their part.

“Of course, we already monitor and report climate action, but the specific details in the scoring have helped us identify additional ways in which we can measure progress.”

Liz says that the Scorecards have helped them focus on messaging, as well: “They’re a helpful tool to provide confidence to stakeholders that we’re making meaningful progress in taking climate action — and we’ve also used them to help improve the way we inform the public about our progress, as it highlighted that perhaps we don’t always promote some of the good work we do.

“So we’ve now included reference to the Scorecards on the council’s website, to show the public we are improving our scores and to encourage them to find out more.”
Finally, there’s one other big, positive change where the Scorecards played a part:

“They brought the conversation back to our energy supply, and we realised we still didn’t have a 100% renewable tariff. We took action and now we do. Not only that, but a ‘deep green’ tariff that directly supports new, sustainable generation.”

Many thanks to Liz for sharing the impacts that the Scorecards have had on Hart Council and beyond. The Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Mr Ignavy (CC by/sa-2.0)

Have you visited sewagemap.co.uk? If you care about your local rivers, lakes and seas, you might want to take a look at this very graphic display of where sewage is being discharged across England.

If you’re wondering which sense of ‘graphic’ we mean, well, it’s both: first, it’s easy to see the information at a glance. And second, if there’s an active discharge right now, you’ll see an unapologetic poo emoji hovering above your postcode, alongside a brown river to show how the sewage will spread.

So this is a very useful site that makes it easy to understand the current picture around sewage discharges in your area. But if you’re hoping to understand how the situation is changing, you’re out of luck. You can’t see historic data, and that’s because — with the exception of Thames Water — the water companies don’t make it publicly available.

Infuriating, right? Good! Because, thanks to incorporation of our WriteToThem service into the site’s workflow, you can email your MP and let them know why you think this data is important.

And it’s working — we became aware of the site because of the number of messages it refers through to WriteToThem. Curious to know more, we spoke to Alex Lipp, one of the site’s two creators, to find out how it had come about, and what it has achieved.

“It’s kind of a pet project,” Alex explains. “One day I was was playing around and I noticed there was live sewage data being published by water companies. 

“Now, the data itself might be quite dull, but I realised that if you could make the link between sewage stats and the rivers that people know and love, they would be more likely to take an interest. 

“I work in fresh water science so I could handle the technical side of things; and Johnny, a friend from uni, works in geodata visualisation: he did the design. The set-up isn’t exactly high-tech: it’s literally running off my old laptop, plugged into an Ethernet port at work. 

“But it works — it performs well in search engines, and it had 350,000 views last year. We just want to present what would normally be very boring environmental data in a way that engages and makes sense to regular people. Existing sites only showed the points of discharge. It just seemed really obvious to me that what people wanted was information about impacted rivers, which was not included in the other visualisations at all. So I added it in!”

And that historic data would be useful too, right, so people could see whether things were improving or declining?

“Yes! Perhaps surprisingly, Thames Water are much better than other providers, when it comes to data transparency. They published data before all the others, and they have a live API you can query. 

“The other water companies make it difficult to query historical data – you generally have to send them an EIR request, because the law technically only requires them to share live data. It’s an oversight of the 2021 Environment Act that water companies aren’t required to publish historical data. So we note on the site where a company doesn’t make it available, and that’s the prompt for people to email their MP and explain why it’s needed.”

Why does the site only cover England? “The Environment Act doesn’t apply to Scotland or Wales – so that’s even more complicated. In Scotland and Wales, water companies are nationalised. They voluntarily publish similar data, but aren’t required to, and it’s in a different format.”

And so – with the site encouraging users to email their MPs, what makes for an effective message? Alex reckons it’s two things:

“Personal stories, and local stories. Just at a fundamental level it feels wrong for sewage to be going into rivers”. So, if you can explain what it means to you — maybe you’d like to take your kids swimming in that river, or you remember it being a clean place to play when you were a kid yourself? “Yes. It’s actually an issue most people can agree on, and there’s strong cross-party support.

“And I think this is a mutable thing that could be fixed…well, lets see if that’s true!”

What impacts has Alex seen so far? “We have a lot of users, and I get a lot of contact from members of the public — anglers, swimmers, campaign groups — who use the data we present and our visualisations to help gauge whether the rivers are safe. 

“I’m also fairly confident (but can’t directly prove) that MPs are using the site to get data for discussions that have taken place in Parliament, and are recorded in Hansard. And, most recently, the press team for the recent Dirty Business documentary used the site to get information for their campaign. 

“So, we have in general had a distributed impact via widespread use. I confidently think we have contributed to the wider discussion, applying pressure to fix the issue of sewage spills.”

We very much hope so! If you agree that data is the key to understanding the sewage spills issue, and being able to do something about it, head over to sewagemap.co.uk, check out your own postcode and then drop a line to your MP (you’ll find the link in the ‘discharge history’ tab when you click on an icon) to let them know.

The FOI Network is an informal coalition of civil society organisations, journalists and academics with an interest in Freedom of Information, convened by mySociety and State of the Future. Last week, we held our first meet-up, in the shape of an online workshop, to discuss and prioritise the ways in which we might strengthen and defend the right to information in the UK. With potential threats rumbling on the horizon, it was a timely conversation.

Attendees came from a range of organisations and specialities. We had a group brainstorming session to identify firstly, opportunities to strengthen or expand FOI; and secondly, key threats and challenges.

From these, we pulled out four themes, which we discussed from the angle of which activities would bring the most impact for the effort expended.

Thematic groupings

The four topics discussed were:

• The expansion of FOI to currently uncovered bodies/sectors
• AI as an opportunity and challenge, and proactive / better publication
• Practical difficulties/support for FOI within public bodies
• The government’s opposition/lukewarm attitude towards existing/greater transparency

FOI expansion

As  FOI’s reach is expanded, so is its utility to new groups, who would benefit from the Act in different ways. This is an approach that can benefit communities who have historically had low levels of power.

Expanding the FOI Act to new authorities would make possible new avenues of research and enquiry, providing access to useful data where it is not currently available. This includes important areas such as housing; or private contractors to government, where the case for increased transparency is easy to make.

We’re fortunate that we can look to Scotland, where Registered Social Landlords are subject to FOI requests, as an example: there is already a good evidence base for successful expansion. Equally, good arguments for expansion could be made by showing the types of essential questions that cannot currently be answered under the regime as it stands.

AI as opportunity and challenge, and proactive / better publication

In this area, the group decided that there are no highly effective actions that would also be easy to implement. Instead, we would be looking at a range of sensible small interventions around better guidance, training research, and more intensive technical work around proactive disclosure and unlocking the benefits of public data.

There is a wider problem around AI potentially overwhelming appeal mechanisms (for more on this, see the two Information Commissioners’ talks at FOI Fest). There is more to explore here, around triage methods, AI and increased volumes of both requests and appeals.

Practical difficulties/support for FOI within public bodies 

An effective FOI system requires information officers to be well-resourced and supported within their organisation.

Here, potential actions ranged from campaigns for better stats around FOI (making FOI more visible to decision-makers, as in Scotland); sharing and promoting the success stories of FOI to show the value of the work; better networking/surveys of the profession; campaigning for statutory FOI officers; and technical support on document management/search technologies. 

There was also some discussion around organisations where responding to requests pulls officers away from other work, affecting the prevailing attitudes towards FOI. The concept of statutory officers would have some bearing on this.

We will develop this segment in a further workshop, to which practitioners themselves will be invited. 

Government opposed to/has a lukewarm attitude towards transparency

A key concern is how we improve FOI, when some of the mood music coming out of government is in favour of greater restrictions. But at the same time, “government” is a wide term: while there will be some institutional reluctance to transparency, there will also be some pockets where it aligns with other stated objectives. 

We need a clearer map and understanding of these factions. We may need to be both defensive, pushing back against threats to transparency, while also building diverse institutional support. One benefit of an FOI network is that different parts of the coalition can do both at once.

From this follows a need for positive, public advocacy for the benefits of transparency, as well as a clear narrative of how it fits into wider government agendas around the redress of historic injustice, anti-corruption, value for money and so forth.

So that’s the summary of our discussion. We’ll keep you posted with progress reports from the FOI Network.

The next meet-up is about how the Network can support journalists and specialist users of FOI: if that’s of interest, sign up here.

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Image: Mark Fletcher-Brown