We’ve had 109,653 Freedom of Information  and Environmental Information Regulations requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow this year. In the run up to the end of 2022 here’s a countdown of 12 of the more unusual ones that have caught our eye this year…

12: Bats

National Highways released 1.25 TB of bat survey data carried out for the Arundel bypass scheme. This was made up of over 115,000 files, that included 786 videos – that’s over 250 hours of footage – 54,570 audio files, 354 spreadsheets and 2,532 images.

We like this because we think it is the largest ever release of information, and as the climate crisis brings urgent challenges for our public institutions to address, access to environmental information will be increasingly valuable to businesses, campaign groups and the general public. You can read more about this release here.

11: Vaccines

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency released the nucleotide sequences of the AstraZeneca & Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines used in the UK, after an initial refusal was overturned on review. The response says the companies involved consented to the release.

We liked this because it is a great use of FOI to get such important medical information released and available in the public domain.

10: Bins

Sheffield City Council released the location of every public bin in the city.

We liked this because not only is it really useful information; it is the sort of data that councils should be making freely available to citizens.

 

 

 

 

9: Underground

Edinburgh City Council released the sewer and cable plans for parts of the city centre.

We liked this because they are chaotically beautiful — not what you’d expect from an underground asset plan.

 

 

8: Textbook

The Open University released a full textbook in response to a request for the information held on the Early modern Europe: society and culture c.1500-1780 module(s).

We liked this because it’s not not often that you see full textbooks being released.

 

 

 

7: Tower Bridge

The City of London Corporation released a list of the past Tower Bridge lift dates, times, and vessel names from the start of 2022 until now.

We liked this because it generated a long and sometimes amusing conversation on Reddit.

 

 

6: War memorabilia

The Ministry of Defence released a WW2 medal card.

We liked this because we’ve never seen something like this obtained by FOI before.

 

 

 

 

5: Honours board

The Charter Trustees of the Town of Margate released their Freedom of the Town list in a more unusual format.

We liked this because the information released was a photo of a painted wooden board. This is, after all, still a form of recorded information — and a nice permanent one.

 

 

 

 

 

4: Seaside nuisance

Brighton & Hove City Council released a copy of all of the bye-laws that apply to the seafront.

We liked this because of the phrase: “no annoying gramophones on the beach”, which may be a slightly outdated view of the worst possible noise nuisance.

 

 

 

3: Big cats

North Wales police released the details of big cat sightings in 2021.

We liked this because the information disclosed in the request was used for a number of news articles in Wales.

 

 

 

2: Library books

One of our users has been doing some research into the top 25 books borrowed from libraries in 2021; here’s an example of one of them.

We liked this because it’s fascinating to see what books people are choosing to read, and how this varies between different areas of the country.

 

 

 

1: Trains galore

And finally, here at WhatDoTheyKnow the team are all big fans of trains. This means we tend to notice the more interesting disclosures on train related topics. Here are some of our favourites from this year:

 

 

 

a. Network Rail released the engineering drawings that were produced during the construction of the London & South Western Railway’s station at Branksome, near Bournemouth in the mid to late 1800. 

We liked this because the drawings are beautifully crafted and not something that we get to see very often.

b. Northern Trains Limited released the .wav file of the two jingles used for their station automated announcements system.

We liked this because it’s unusual for audio files to be released and we’ve found so many uses for this!

c. London North Eastern Railway Limited (LNER) released some information about the voiceover artists used for the automated announcements on the Class 800 and Class 801 fleet of trains

We like this because it shows that FOI responses don’t need to be formal or complicated; they just provide, where possible, the information that the request-maker has asked for. LNER is  particularly good at this.

d. Transport for London released 3D station layout drawings for the Elizabeth line.

We liked this because it’s really interesting to see how the new stations on the Elizabeth line have been designed, and how the layout works with their surroundings.

 

 

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We hope you enjoyed 12(ish) of our favourite FOI requests from this year.

You can find out more information about the WhatDoTheyKnow service and  how to make requests on our help pages.

If you’d like to help WhatDoTheyKnow keep up their good work, you can help in two ways, either by volunteering us or by making a donation, any amount small or large is greatly appreciated.

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Image credits:

Vaccines CDC; Bins Charlotte Harrison; Tower Bridge: R Spegel; Brighton seafront Tom Wheatley; Big cat: Mana5280; Library: Dollar Gill

WhatDoTheyKnow is a project of mySociety, run by a small team of staff and dedicated volunteers.

In 2022 WhatDoTheyKnow users made 109,653 Freedom of Information requests via WhatDoTheyKnow.

Those requests, and the responses they received, are public on the website for anyone to see.  

What’s not quite so visible is the work that the WhatDoTheyKnow team, which is largely made up of volunteers, do behind the scenes.  

Some of their most difficult calls arise around the removal of information. WhatDoTheyKnow’s guiding principle is that it is a permanent, public, archive of Freedom of Information requests and responses, open to all.

The team works incredibly hard to maintain the archive in the face of challenges, including the reduction of legal risks; dealing fairly and transparently when people ask for information to be removed from the site; answering users’ questions; supporting citizens to use their rights to FOI; dealing with misuse of the service which breaches our house rules inappropriate content and keeping everything ticking over.

Our default position is not to remove substantive public information requests and responses; however, we act quickly if problematic content is reported to us. And, to help everyone understand exactly what has been removed and why, where possible we record these details on the request page.

To allow for a full 12 months of data, the date range used throughout this report is 1 November 2021 to 31 October 2022.

Headline facts and figures

• 16,354,872 visits to WhatDoTheyKnow.com this year.
• 16,217 new WhatDoTheyKnow user accounts created this year, taking the total number of accounts to 239,540. This represents an increase of 7.6% in the total number of site users since last year.
• 8,912 total number of email threads in the support inbox in 2022… that’s an increase of 11.2%, making it all the more crucial that we continue to recruit volunteers to help spread the load.
• 1,381 requests hidden from WhatDoTheyKnow in 2022
  …in the context of 109,653 requests made in the year, and a total of 867,303 requests currently published on the site.
• 171 published requests where we redacted some material in 2022
  …usually due to the inappropriate inclusion of personal information, or defamation.

And in more detail

Requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow flagged for our attention

The table below shows the reasons that requests were reported by our users via the site for admin attention this year. 

Note that we also receive many reports directly by email, so while not comprehensive, this is indicative.

Reason for attention report	Total number
Vexatious	117
Not a valid request	109
Contains personal information	89
Request for personal information	85
Contains defamatory material	33
Other	642
Total*	1,075

*The number of requests flagged for attention this year is up 40% on last year. This is largely related to a single campaign of misuse.

Material removed from the site

The following tables show where members of the admin team have acted to remove or hide requests from WhatDoTheyKnow in the last year, and the reason why.

At WhatDoTheyKnow  we have a policy of removing as little material as possible, while seeking to run the site responsibly and take different viewpoints into account. Removing substantive FOI requests and responses is a last resort and something we do very rarely. However, we act quickly to remove problematic material.

Request visibility	Total number
Discoverable only to those who have the link to the request	2
Visible only to the request maker	1,282
Hidden from all site visitors	97

 

Reason for removing from public view	Total number**
Not a valid FOI request	1,117
Vexatious use of FOI	43
Other (reason not programmatically recorded*)	221

* Current processes do not create an easily retrievable list of reasons beyond the two above, however due to site improvements made in autumn of this year we expect to be able to provide more detailed information on this in the future.

** The number of requests hidden or removed from the site this year is up by 68% on last year. As above, this increase is largely related to a single campaign of misuse. 

Censor rules (targeted redactions to hide the problematic part/s of a request)	Total number
Number of censor rules applied	746
Number of requests with censor rules applied	171
Number of requests with censor rules applied which are still publicly visible, but with problematic material hidden	165

* Censor rules are used for many purposes, including redacting problematic content and removing personal data which should not be present

Cases relating to GDPR rights 

These are typically cases relating to requests to remove data published on the site as per the rights afforded under GDPR, the UK’s General Data Protection Regulations.

Right type	Total number of cases*
GDPR Right to Erasure	214
Data breaches by third parties	79
GDPR Right to Rectification	15
GDPR Right of Access	21
Data breach – internal**	6
GDPR Right to Object	<5
Total	340

* Not all issues raised resulted in material being removed from the site.

* “Data Breach – internal” refers to cases where WhatDoTheyKnow has identified that a data breach may have been caused due to our own staff actions. We take our obligations seriously, and use such instances as a learning opportunity, so these are recorded by us even if very minor, and often when they’re nothing more than a near miss.

High risk concerns escalated for review 

Our policies ensure that certain issues can be escalated for review by the wider team and, where more complex, by a review panel that includes mySociety’s Chief Executive. Escalation is typically prompted by threats of legal action, complaints, notifications of serious data breaches, potential defamation concerns, safeguarding, complex GDPR cases, or cases that raise significant policy questions.

Case type*	Total number
Defamation	49
Data breach	40
GDPR Right to Erasure	33
Complaints	19
Safeguarding / Public harm	13
Takedown	13
GDPR Right of Access	9
Police user data requests	7
Site misuse	7
Data breach – internal	5
Other	39

* Email threads may be either automatically categorised by the system, or manually categorised by the WhatDoTheyKnow admin team on the basis of the information given by the person reporting them. Some cases can relate to two types: for example a GDPR Right to Erasure request may also be a complaint. For the purposes of this table, such instances have been included in the counts for both concerns.

Users

User accounts	Total
WhatDoTheyKnow users with activated accounts	239,540
New user accounts activated in 2022	16,217

 

Reason for banning users in 2022	Total
Spam	2,160
Other site misuse	300
Total number of users banned in 2022	2,460

 

Anonymisation*	Total
Accounts anonymised in 2022	139

* Accounts are anonymised at the user’s request, generally to comply with GDPR Right to Erasure requests.

Users are banned and their accounts may be closed due to site misuse and breach of the House Rules. Anonymised and banned users are no longer able to make requests or use their accounts.

User data requests

The table below shows the number of requests that we received from third parties for the personal data that we hold on our users in 2022. Details of which types of data we hold can be found in our privacy policy. As stated in our privacy policy, we do not provide this information to anyone else unless we are obliged to by law, or the user asks us to.

Type of request	Total
Police/law enforcement requests for user data	7
Other requests for user data	6

 

Material released	Total
Number of requests, where court orders were produced and we provided the material as required	2

 

Thank you for reading

We produce this report as we demand transparency from public authorities and it’s only right that we also practise it ourselves. 

Additionally, we hope that the report goes some way to showing the type of work the team do behind the scenes, and that running a well-used site like WhatDoTheyKnow is not without challenges.

If there are specific statistics that you’d like to see in subsequent Transparency reports, or you’d like to know more about any of those above, do drop the team a line. 

If you’d like to help WhatDoTheyKnow keep up their good work, please consider volunteering or making a donation. Any help small or large is greatly appreciated.

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Image: Meriç Dağlı

.

You can send Freedom of Information requests to more than 45,000 public authorities on WhatDoTheyKnow. For each of those authorities we need an email address to send those requests to, which means we often need to do some maintenance to keep everything up to date.

For some authorities in our database we don’t have a working email address. We might have had one in the past but it’s now out of date, or the authority might have merged and taken on new contact details – there are many reasons for missing email addresses, but they all leave us in the same predicament: we don’t know where to send your FOI requests for those bodies.

Can you help us find them?

If you have a little time to spare, a small amount of Googling could be a really big help for our users. Just five minutes here and there is all that’s needed to do a little bit of research to find the correct address.  

We’ve made a list of all authorities with a missing email address. 

The best starting point is almost always the authority’s website. Look for a dedicated contact email address for Freedom of Information requests.

Top tips for searching:

• Check the contact page.
• Check the footer on the homepage.
• Try looking for Freedom of Information policies or Publication Schemes,  or sometimes an email address can appear in the privacy policy.
• Remember some public authorities such as schools and parish councils have very similar names, so make sure you are looking at the right one.
• If you can’t find a website for the authority itself, there are some other places that you can look: for example the NHS services site  or the Get Information about Schools site.

Once you’ve found the right place, make a note of the contact email address. We prefer to use generic email addresses, for example that starting with foi@ or information@ as these tend not to change so often, so if there are multiple addresses given, these are the best ones to go for.

Let us know

If you find some of these missing email addresses please let us know.

We need both the new email address and the source (website address) where you found it, so we can verify the information.

You can send us this information by clicking on “Ask us to update FOI email” link on the public authority’s page. Just fill out the form with all the details that you’ve found.

Then our team of volunteers will use your input  to update the database, and you’ll have ensured that people can make requests to the authority. That’s a really useful result.

Time poor but rich in other ways?

We know that your time is very precious and not everyone has the opportunity to help us out with tasks. If you are able to make a donation instead, that is also very helpful toward keeping our FOI service up and running.

Your contributions, however small, really help. Donate here.

 

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Image: Marten Newhall 

In 2021 WhatDoTheyKnow users made 100,092 Freedom of Information requests.

Those requests, and the responses they received, are public on the website for anyone to see. But what’s not quite so visible is the work the WhatDoTheyKnow team do behind the scenes — answering users’ questions, removing inappropriate content and keeping everything ticking over.

Some of the team’s most difficult calls arise around the removal of information. WhatDoTheyKnow’s guiding principle is that it is a permanent, public archive of Freedom of Information requests and responses, open to all.

For this reason, the default position is not to remove substantive public information requests and responses; however, we act quickly if problematic content is reported to us. And, to help everyone understand exactly what has been removed and why, where possible we record these details on the request page.

This year, for the first time, we’re extending our efforts towards transparency even further, with this report in which we’ll summarise the information removal requests and actions taken during the last twelve months.

To allow for a full 12 months of data, the date range used throughout this report is 1 November 2020 to 31 October 2021

Headline facts and figures

• 20,714,033 visitors to WhatDoTheyKnow.com this year
• 22,847 new WhatDoTheyKnow user accounts this year, taking the total to 222,694
• 7,971 total number of email threads in the support inbox in 2021
• 822 requests hidden from WhatDoTheyKnow in 2021
  …in the context of 100,092 requests made in the year, and a total of 772,971 requests now published on the site
• 196 Total number of published requests where we redacted some material in 2021
  …usually due to the inappropriate inclusion of personal information, or defamation.
• 126 The number of users who created accounts this year banned
  …that’s just 0.06% of new users.
• WhatDoTheyKnow is a project of mySociety run by a small team of staff and dedicated volunteers.

And in more detail…

Requests flagged for our attention

The table below shows the reasons that requests were reported for admin attention this year. Note that we also receive many reports directly by email, so while not comprehensive, this is indicative.

Reason for attention request	Total number
Contains personal information	143
Not a valid request	108
Vexatious	94
Request for personal information	85
Contains defamatory material	51
Other	287
Total	768

Material removed from the site

The following tables show where members of the support team have acted to remove or hide requests from WhatDoTheyKnow in the last year, and the reason why.

There is a range of options available to moderators, from ‘hidden’ (the most extreme) to ‘discoverable with link’. This is in addition to the censor rules that are used to hide certain information within a request or response.

Request visibility	Total number
Visible only to the request maker	805
Discoverable only to those who have the link to the request	11
Hidden	8

Reason for removing from public view	Total number
Not a valid FOI request	701
Vexatious use of FOI	29
Other (reason not programmatically recorded*)	124

*Current processes do not create an easily retrievable list of reasons beyond the two above, but we are hoping to improve our systems so future transparency reports can include a more detailed breakdown.

Censor rules (programmatically hiding the problematic part/s of a request)	Total number
Number of censor rules applied	881
Number of requests with censor rules applied	196
Number of requests with censor rules applied which are still publicly visible, but with problematic material hidden	188

Data protection issues raised to the WhatDoTheyKnow user support inbox 

The following data shows the number of email threads* received into the WhatDoTheyKnow user support inbox regarding the most common types of concern around information published on the site. Not all issues raised resulted in material being removed from the site.

GDPR = UK General Data Protection Regulations
DPA: Data Protection Act

Label	Total number of threads
GDPR Right to Erasure	317
Defamation	130
Data breach	96
GDPR & DPA concerns (type not specified)	42
GDPR Right to Rectification	33
GDPR Right of Access	21
Harassment	17
GDPR Right to Object	12
Data breach – internal**	2
Impersonation	1
Total	674

* Email threads may be either automatically categorised by the system, or manually categorised by the WhatDoTheyKnow support team on the basis of the information given by the person reporting them.

** “Data Breach – internal” refers to cases where WhatDoTheyKnow has identified that a data breach may have been caused due to our own staff actions. We take our obligations seriously, and use such instances as a learning opportunity, so these are reported even if very minor, and often when they’re nothing more than a near miss — which both of these cases were.

High risk concerns raised for review 

Our policies ensure that certain issues can be escalated for review by the wider team and, where more complex, by a review panel that includes mySociety’s Chief Executive and the Chair of the Trustees.  Escalation is typically prompted by threats of legal action, complaints, notifications of serious data breaches, complex GDPR cases, or cases that raise significant policy questions.

Case type*	Total number
Defamation	66
GDPR Right to Erasure	42
Data breach	40
Complaints	33
GDPR & DPA concerns	11
GDPR Right of Access	6
Harassment	5
Takedown	2
GDPR Right to Object	2
GDPR Right to Rectification	1
Other	78
Total	286

* Email threads may be either automatically categorised by the system, or manually categorised by the WhatDoTheyKnow support team on the basis of the information given by the person reporting them.

Users

User accounts	Total
WhatDoTheyKnow users with activated accounts	222,694
New user accounts activated in 2021	22,847

Reason for banning users in 2021	Total
Spam	3,936
Other site misuse	166
Total number of users banned in 2021	4,102

Anonymisation*	Total
Accounts anonymised in 2021	170

* Where accounts have been anonymised this is at the user’s request, generally to comply with GDPR Right to Erasure requests.

Users are banned and their accounts may be closed due to site misuse and breach of the House Rules. Anonymised and banned users are no longer able to make requests or use their accounts.

Thank you for reading

This is the first time we’ve compiled a Transparency Report like this for WhatDoTheyKnow, but it’s something we’ve been wanting to do for some time. We demand transparency from public authorities and it’s only right that we also practice it ourselves. 

Additionally, we hope that the report goes some way to showing the type of work the team do behind the scenes, and that moderating a well-used site like WhatDoTheyKnow is not without challenges.

In future years, we hope to build on this initial report, ideally automating many of the stats so that they can be seen on a live dashboard. For now, we thought it was worthwhile making a manually-compiled proof of concept. 

If there are specific statistics that you’d like to see in subsequent Transparency reports, or you’d like to know more about any of those above, do drop the team a line. They’ll get back to you as soon as the urgent moderation work is done!

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See mySociety’s 2021 annual review

Image: Create & Bloom