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Digital Democracy Edinburgh, presented by TICTeC, is an international two-day conference that will take place in Scotland’s capital city on 11 & 12 March 2027.
Policymakers, researchers, civic tech practitioners, public servants, and democratic innovators will come together to explore democratic futures and how digital tools can help make democratic institutions around the world more effective, inclusive and resilient.
We’re delighted to share that registration for the conference is now open, allowing both in-person and online access.
We’ve also just opened up a call for session/presentation proposals, which invites individuals, and groups of contributors, to submit their ideas for the conference proceedings. Read on to learn what we’re looking for in proposals.
What is Digital Democracy Edinburgh?
Digital Democracy Edinburgh is a collaboration between the Scottish Government, the University of Edinburgh Futures Institute, mySociety, and the AI for Collective Intelligence (AI4CI) Hub.
Digital Democracy Edinburgh is made possible with additional generous support from the Evens Foundation, RadicalxChange and Delib.
Produced by the team behind TICTeC, this conference builds on more than a decade of work connecting research and practice in civic technology. It is also the official follow-up to Digital Democracy The Hague 2025, continuing a growing international conversation about the future of democratic participation in the digital age.
Across two days, around 150-200 leading practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and technologists from around the world will come together to share evidence, experiences, and practical approaches for making democratic systems more responsive, inclusive, and effective.
Call for proposals: open until 15 November
Digital Democracy Edinburgh themes
The core question of this event is:
How can we use technology to reimagine democratic decision-making and build a more resilient democracy for the future?
Through the conference, we will explore how high-quality, deliberative, participation can be enhanced through digital technology, in democracies around the world.
This means bringing together expertise and cutting-edge findings to support groups contributing to difficult decisions globally – including findings about the uses of AI technologies which the public can trust.
We will invite proposals in the following themes:
- Building democratic technology
- Democracy in a digital age
- Embedding digital democracy in institutions around the world
The goal is not three different conversations: for each one we want speakers to think about how their knowledge and experience might help and inform those coming at the problem from different angles. Here is more detail on each of these themes:
Building democratic technology
How do we build technology and digital infrastructure capable of supporting democratic goals?
This is the technologist strand – how should technology react and adapt to best fulfill democratic/public values? And how should technologists in practice work to deliver that?
Potential areas include:
- Digital public infrastructure
- Participatory decision-making platforms
- Deliberative technology and digital deliberation
- AI-assisted deliberation
- Sustainable models for civic technology – eg Open Source
- Tech solutions for infrastructure-poor settings
Democracy in a digital age
How does new technology shape how we think about and practice democracy?
This is the democratic practitioner strand – how should those working in democratic participation and deliberation make decisions about technology? How is practice evolving?
Potential areas include:
- Quality of participation and deliberation
- Blending online and offline participation
- Transparency and accountability
- Theoretical implications of AI for collective intelligence
- Digital exclusion
Embedding digital democracy around the world
How can governments and democratic institutions make the most of new technologies and ideas?
This is the government/institutional strand – exploring how experimentation and innovation can be embedded in democratic institutions, and interact with representative democracy.
Here, we are interested in case studies and research on how local and national governments are approaching digital democracy in practice, and the rewards and challenges of that, with a particular focus on examples that can transfer across cultural, institutional, and infrastructural contexts to include lower-income democracies.
Potential areas include:
- Open government and participation
- Scaling democratic innovations across tiers
- Transferring innovations between contexts
- Lessons from implementation and adoption
- Long-term sustainability and meta-governance
- Distinctive challenges for lower income democracies
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Kiran Crawford volunteered for the Council Climate Action Scorecards — and now he’s a town councillor, using everything the Scorecards taught him about local authorities’ powers to take climate action.
Kiran was elected as a Green councillor for Royal Leamington Spa Town council in July 2026. Prior to that, as a longtime volunteer with Climate Emergency UK, he helped make the Scorecards a reality.
Part of Scorecards from the very beginning
“I originally volunteered for the first iteration of the Scorecards back in 2021, after hearing about them from a friend who had also signed up as a volunteer.
“Having been involved in some climate campaigning before, I was looking for more ways to support good policy. The Scorecards sounded like a great way to find out how good councils’ plans were, and I thought they could be really helpful tool in campaigning for action, so I signed up to help with the assessments.
“I found the process really interesting, and learnt a lot about what powers councils have around climate. Given how useful I could see the Scorecards would be, I then volunteered as a media amplifier to help get the launch out to the press, so that they could reach as many people as possible.
“After the first Scorecards were released, I joined a workshop on developing the criteria for the second iteration, which this time aimed to mark the action councils are taking rather than just the plans.
“I then became part of the advisory group refining these questions and how they would be marked. I was there to represent the campaigner’s point of view, alongside many experts from local government.
“When the 2023 Scorecards came around, I volunteered again to mark, this time assessing the transport and planning sections. The detailed criteria, and looking at civil documents to assess them, have given me so much knowledge of civil policies and how they work.”
Putting climate action knowledge to use
When Kiran was elected as a councillor, of course, that knowledge became all the more useful.
“It’s been so helpful to know exactly what councils can do. Even though a lot of it is at the District and County levels rather than Town, it means I know where to go and what to advocate for!”
When we spoke to Kiran, he had just attended his first council meeting — where he’d had a success.
“I proposed an amendment to add supportive comments from the town council to the net zero policies in a South Warwickshire Local Plan consultation, hopefully providing more justification to stop any planning inspectors trying to get rid of these higher standards — which I was only able to do from my knowledge of the Scorecard planning sections!
“The Plan includes loads of great Net Zero and infrastructure policies, including requirements for all new buildings to be Net Zero in use, with significantly greater energy efficiency standards and levels of onsite renewables than national minimums.
“It also sets maximum targets on up-front embodied carbon, calculated through whole life carbon assessment for large developments, basically ensuring that they’re built in sustainable methods.
“In addition, it exceeds minimum requirements on EV charging infrastructure, water efficiency and design to prevent overheating in summer. Many of these policies are reflected in questions on the Scorecards, so I immediately recognised their strengths from having marked other councils’ plans!
“Whilst the locations of new developments are of course always controversial, I thought it was important to recognise these policies, which ensure that where any new buildings are constructed, they are built sustainably and fit for the future.
“And as there have been several cases of the national government attempting to prevent councils from setting higher efficiency standards, providing the comments that Leamington Town Council supports these policies and that they are in line with the Town Council’s environmental objectives could help show to the government planning inspector that they are supported and justified locally.”
How to talk to your council about climate
Now Kiran’s one himself, how would he advise people who want to approach their councillors about climate action, which, while it sounds simple, can also be daunting?
“The most important thing is to just talk to them about climate, so they know it’s important to you — even if you don’t feel like you know the specifics.”
Kiran has a very good point: our representatives do pay attention to their constituents’ priorities, and are steered by their opinions.
‘Talking’ to your councillor can be as simple as sending them an email through WriteToThem, if you can’t spare the time for a face to face meeting. And your message really can be as simple as “Please prioritise climate action.”
Kiran also points out, however, that if you include some facts and figures relating to your local area, your message will immediately be more relevant to councillors. “If you want to find out details of policies you could suggest, then the Scorecards are a great place to start!”
It’s brilliant to hear how the Scorecards can help both sides of the equation — constituents and councillors — and not least, how involvement as a volunteer has led to a more informed, evidence-based approach to local policy in Leamington Spa. Thanks very much to Kiran for sharing his experiences.
The Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.
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Image: Kristina Bekher
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Digital Democracy Edinburgh will take place on 11 & 12 March 2027 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Save the date to join us for two days of exploring how digital tools can help make democratic systems more effective, inclusive and participatory.
How can we practically use technology to improve democratic decision-making and resilience?
This is the core question of this event, which we will answer by bringing together a global audience of practitioners and experts from civic tech, democratic innovation, and local and national governments.
Through the conference, we will explore how high-quality, deliberative, participation can be enhanced through digital technology, in democracies around the world. We will explore the use of technology to make collective decisions, solve shared problems, and govern ourselves effectively.
This means bringing together expertise and cutting-edge findings to support groups contributing to difficult decisions around the world – including findings about the uses of AI technologies which the public can trust.
Digital Democracy Edinburgh is a collaboration between mySociety, the Scottish Government, the University of Edinburgh Futures Institute and the AI for Collective Intelligence (AI4CI) Hub.
The conference is made possible with additional generous support from the Evens Foundation, RadicalxChange and Delib.
Bringing together international approaches as well as local innovation from Scotland and across the UK, the conference will showcase and connect some of the most exciting thinking and practice in digital democracy.
It builds on ten years of TICTeC and last year’s Digital Democracy The Hague conference, continuing a growing international exchange around democracy in the digital age.
Across the two days, we’ll explore what technology can make possible, the implications for democratic practice, and the opportunities and challenges for new approaches within democratic institutions.
Registration, and an open call for proposals, will be published in the next few weeks, with opportunities for researchers, practitioners and others working across these areas to contribute to the programme.
Save 11 & 12 March 2027 in your calendar, and sign up for updates to hear when registration and our open call for proposals opens, and further details are announced.
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We run TheyWorkForYou to make UK politics more accessible and accountable.
Here’s what we’ve been doing recently to make that happen.
We’re keeping you informed
Our alerts service will send you an email whenever your chosen keyword or phrase is mentioned in Parliament; or you can follow any MP or other representative to receive an email when they speak or vote.
So far in 2026, we’ve sent 2.2 million email alerts and our users have created almost 2,000 new keyword alerts through our new and improved alerts management system.
This service helps people understand what their representatives (across all of the UK’s Parliaments) are saying and doing, and also provides an essential service in providing free parliamentary monitoring to civic groups and organisations who can now have as much access to this intel as those with big pockets.
This doesn’t happen by itself: every day our team pulls together the transcripts from the UK’s Parliaments, fixing formatting issues and broken files to get these loaded into the site and our alerts.
If you don’t have alerts set up, what are you waiting for? You can do it now at TheyWorkForYou.com.
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We’re counting the votes
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Learn more about our process, the new votes added, and our ongoing improvements we made to how votes are displayed — and find out how your MP voted at TheyWorkForYou.com.
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We’ve started to make complaints through the standards process where we see what we think is a breach of the rules — you can read about our first successful complaint, where an MP needed to apologise for not declaring a relevant interest when asking a parliamentary question.
This is based on the data and analysis we publish: you can see the register of financial interest for all your representatives (and download full datasets) at TheyWorkForYou.com.
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Democracy doesn’t stand still, and we’re always thinking about how we can improve our approach.
You can see the groups your MP is a member of, plus the Early Day Motions and any open letters they’ve signed on their TheyWorkForYou.com page.
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Images: House of Commons (Open Parliament Licence)
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Every year from around April to September, we see an uptick on people sharing links to our Freedom of Information site, WhatDoTheyKnow on Reddit forums. The reason? It’s the peak time for anxieties around university entry.
As we know, universities are generally looking for the brightest of minds. Perhaps that includes those who have enough initiative to source data around things like their entry requirements and shortlisting criteria.
As public bodies, universities are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, so a lot of this data can be requested; and where people have used WhatDoTheyKnow to do so, the responses are publicly available for other potential students to access in years to come.
So what kind of information are these bright sparks asking for? In a brief analysis, we came across requests which address seven distinct questions for university applicants.
What A-Level subjects should I take to get into the university course of my choice?
Forward planning never hurts, and for some smart kids this comes into play as early as Year 11.
“Does a fourth A-level help you get into the Computer Science course at a top-level university?”, asked a student who was about to pick their sixth form subjects.
A response pointed them to this FOI response from the University of Oxford, indicating that passing four A-levels does indeed appear to help for Oxford, while astutely adding that cause does not always align with correlation: “It’s hard to know whether other things impacted the offer rate there, eg are people more likely to do well on the admissions tests if they’re doing four?”.
What GCSE marks do I need to achieve in my exams to enter the university I want?
The anxieties start early, as we see from this post asking “Does Cambridge ever reject people because of slightly weaker GCSEs compared to the applicant pool?” and this one wondering whether a B in Maths GCSE is enough to get into Bath Uni.
The required data was provided here and here, for the prospective students to consult and draw their own conclusions.
How can I access past university entry tests for practice purposes?
One chemistry enthusiast found that old Oxford Uni entry tests were available only to current students on the student portal — not much use for those wanting to practice before the real thing!
A kind soul was able to point them at this request, giving access to several past papers from 2003 to 2017. That’s just one of many such requests across multiple subjects at several unis: in fact, there have been so many on WhatDoTheyKnow that we’ve created a ‘past exam papers’ section on our categories page.
How do universities decide shortlists?
This Reddit post was subsequently deleted by its author, but from the responses it is clear that it was asking whether the author’s results would be likely to see them shortlisted for interview.
The FOI request provided in the comments is a smart one, referring back to a previous successful request and asking that the same data be provided for the most recent time period.
When do universities send out offer letters?
Once you’ve done all you can on your application, interview and any entrance tests, all that remains is to sit back and wait for the hoped-for offer letter.
This helpful Redditor, sharing dates from previous years around the Maths with Data Science course at LSE, said, “I thought the following would be worth mentioning for those who have applied, and are agonisingly checking their emails at 8pm; waiting for news that will seemingly never come.”
They shared this request, the response to which provided rich data beyond just the decision dates for each applicant: we can also see predicted grades, country of residence, and their TMUA test scores.
What’s the best way to pick university course modules?
So you’ve been accepted onto the course? The usefulness of FOI doesn’t stop there! In this request, a student about to start their first year studying Maths at Warwick University was wondering which optional course modules to select.
They were asking which might have the best lecturers or be the most interesting overall; but in a comment, another fresher shared that they had already submitted an FOI request to understand which modules resulted in the highest number of exam/coursework marks — so not only were they able to provide useful extra context, but also to identify themselves as a soon-to-be classmate!
What are the stats around Postgrad waiting lists?
Finally, for those who got onto a uni course and then enjoyed it so much that they went on to apply to a postgraduate degree, there are still more questions to be asked.
Questions like the total number of applications received, the number of applicants placed on a waiting list, and the number who subsequently received an offer.
This kind Redditor gathered together three FOI requests to answer those questions.
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If you’re a student wondering about similar questions to those above, we hope this has been a useful guide to everything you can discover thanks to Freedom of Information. The first step is to search WhatDoTheyKnow to see whether what you need has already been requested — and if the exact information you seek isn’t already on there, check out our handy guide for some basic guidance in making a request yourself.
Requests come thick and fast at this time of year, and we suspect from a younger userbase than is our norm. We don’t mind it at all — in fact, we hope it provides a gateway to using FOI for life, and perhaps exploring all mySociety’s other useful online tools for civic action.
Oh, and if you’re a member of university staff yourself, here’s food for thought: as we’ve demonstrated above, this type of information is very much in demand. You could consider proactively publishing it on your site, so there’s no need for students to make requests at all. WhatDoTheyKnow will also be a useful resource for you — check what students have requested from your uni, and from others, to help understand what type of information people are keen to access.
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Image: Chris Boland
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Many of us may have wanted to put the Covid pandemic out of our minds once it passed — but those with more medical and scientific understanding would be justified in exploring a little more deeply into how well the UK government and our NHS services handled it. What can we see from the facts and figures around lockdowns, mortality rates and even the efficacy of testing?
One ideal tool for this type of enquiry is Freedom of Information — the right to ask public authorities for recorded information. And the Trust The Evidence project, run by Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, has made very good use of that, thanks to WhatDoTheyKnow.
Their approach? Small, focused FOI requests lodged via WhatDoTheyKnow (and therefore accessible for everyone to see), followed by deeper analysis and articles both in the media and on their own SubStack, which is supported by an engaged audience.
We asked Tom and Carl to tell us a bit more about how they’ve used FOI and what they have discovered about the UK’s response to the pandemic, as well as other pressing health matters. First of all, how have they come to be working together?
“We’d collaborated for a decade before beginning our research on the evidence surrounding the Covid pandemic in 2020. We’re both medically trained epidemiologists and academics with a background in primary care.”
As you may remember, in the UK, lockdowns and the closure of many businesses and public spaces began in the spring of 2020. “As early as April 2020, we predicted that lockdowns would have devastating effects on both lives and the economy.”
Background knowledge
They weren’t basing that prediction on mere speculation— they had the professional expertise to back it up. Tom is a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford, a former researcher at the Nordic Cochrane Centre and a former scientific coordinator for producing HTA reports on non-pharmaceuticals for Agenas, the Italian National Agency for Regional Healthcare.
Carl is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. He is a clinical epidemiologist with expertise in evidence-based medicine, research methods, and evidence synthesis. He also works as an NHS urgent care GP.
Nonetheless, their early interventions did not go down well.
“We faced persecution for asking questions. We endured personal attacks and censorship from self-proclaimed experts, influencers, and the very institutions we’d dedicated decades of our careers to.
“That’s when we decided to launch our own SubStack forum called “Trust the Evidence”, where we focus on examining evidence rather than popular narratives or spin. The goal is to advocate for policies grounded in evidence rather than dogma, ultimately driving meaningful change.”
And where does that evidence come from?
“Well — this is where Freedom of Information requests become important.”
Advocating for policies based on evidence
“Over the last six years we have either reviewed or made hundreds of FOI requests, and in WhatDoTheyKnow we’ve found information released via other people’s requests, as well as the ability to pursue our own inquiries, openly and with short, sharp questions. We now routinely use FOI to try to understand what’s behind the official narrative and to verify its evidence base.
“So, for example, in the winter of 2021-2022 we set out to analyse public authorities’ understanding of PCR testing for SARs-CoV-2 in the UK by looking at FOI requests others had posed in 2020-21 to NHS Health Trusts, laboratories, and government agencies such as Public Health England and the Department of Health and Social Care.
“We searched WhatDoTheyKnow using specific terms, such as “PCR cycle threshold,” to understand the use of PCR in the UK public sector, and we reviewed 300 FOI requests from more than 150 members of the public who were asking questions about the £37 billion Test And Trace programme. We noticed that, often, members of the public understood and knew more about the topic than those who responded. We found evidence of extensive misuse and misreporting of the tests used.
“So FOI requests showed that members of the public understood the types of tests used, their shortcomings, and the willingness of public bodies to bend the results to fit the general narrative, which supported the government’s introduction of emergency measures without a credible assessment of the threat.
“We quickly followed up this work with research into several more related areas: Covid benefits fraud; various definitions of Covid deaths; excessive mortality in care homes; the potential harms and benefits of Covid vaccines (Comirnaty regulatory evidence & adverse effects, Vaxzevria and Yellow Card adverse-event data); Hospital-acquired COVID / respiratory-virus infections; Avian-influenza vaccines and procurement and then more broadly into NHS expenditure/accountability; Influenza and NHS winter-crisis evidence.”
A hectic few years
There is clearly an audience for this work. Carl and Tom are closing in on close to 1,400 posts to date, with subscribers from 140 countries having viewed their mailouts more than 11 million times.
But it doesn’t stop there. “When we consider the sharing and republication of our work, as well as media interest and parliamentary questions, the reach becomes remarkable. The content has been republished in various outlets and cited by multiple news organisations, with translations into several foreign languages.
“This all shows the central role that WhatDoTheyKnow has played and continues to play in our work. Subscribing to WhatDoTheyKnow Pro has made things much easier, as we can send batch requests to multiple authorities at once, building up a national dataset that didn’t previously exist.
“At present, we are working on summarising the replies to 161 batched FOI requests to NHS bodies regarding Influenza/NHS winter-crisis evidence. We’ll soon follow that up with over 200 requests to NHS bodies for details of their 2026-27 winter plans.
“It’s been a hectic few years of work! We can only add that FOI and WhatDoTheyKnow are central to what we’re doing.
“We’ve managed to get replies; but also, public bodies often try to evade transparency. We write about that, too — it is all part of the evidence.”
Evidence, rigour and expertise
The ultimate aim? “We present robust evidence. We apply scientific rigour alongside our extensive clinical expertise. This approach ensures that our insights are credible, and also deeply aligned with the societal values that should underpin healthcare.
“And by bringing diverse voices and perspectives into our discussions, we strive to foster richer conversations that pave the way for safer, more informed healthcare.”
Many thanks to Tom and Carl for sharing their experiences of using WhatDoTheyKnow. You can subscribe to Trust The Evidence to access their full archive of posts and they say, “we’re happy to see our posts republished with proper acknowledgement.”
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Image: iMattSmart
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Are you one of the many who has watched the BBC’s two-parter Buried with Michael Sheen? If so, you may have experienced increasing levels of outrage as the actor helps to uncover the scandalous dumping of toxic waste across sites in Wales and England — and lays out the effects, only now fully emerging, that this has had on local residents’ health.
Sheen, is, of course, the big draw; the well-loved actor getting the UK to take an interest in a complex, localised topic. But in several scenes, you’ll also have seen Paul Cawthorne, vicar and environmental campaigner: helping to test soil at the contaminated sites; sharing a testimony from one of his parishioners who had been employed to dump the chemicals; and providing background information from more than a decade of investigations.
What you won’t necessarily have realised is that much of that background information has been obtained, over the years, from Freedom of Information requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow — this case stands as an example of how FOI can play a crucial part in bringing malpractice to public attention.
Over a decade of dedicated investigation
Paul’s investigation into the dumping dates back many years, and he has made great use of Freedom of Information to secure the evidence to show that giant chemical company Monsanto was appallingly negligent in the disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), now known to be cancer-causing “forever chemicals”, going back as far as the 70s.
Paul was happy to talk to us and let us know all about the part that FOI and WhatDoTheyKnow have played in his search for the facts — you can see his more than 200 requests for yourself, on the site.
Entering the public consciousness
He’s pleased that the programme has brought the topic that has been absorbing him for so long to the public eye: “For the first few years, everyone just assumed that I was making a fuss about nothing, and now it seems to have suddenly reversed.”
The first sign of that was a call from the TV production company, seeking evidence that they could shape the programme around.
If you’ve watched Buried, you’ll know that much of the programme is based around the meticulous records of whistleblower Douglas Gowan, now deceased. He had been an equally dedicated investigator into the issue, years prior, and Michael Sheen had interviewed him before he died.
“Michael had read an article in the Ecologist magazine that I contributed to in 2007, and that’s how he came across Douglas Gowan’s story. I managed to source him a briefcase full of Gowan’s papers, the one that we see in the TV programme.
“It had been very securely lodged, after his death. I’m not even allowed to say who with, but we managed to get access to it, and so it’s been quite a detective story, really.”
Don’t ask awkward questions
And that’s not the only dramatic detail: it was also mentioned in the programme that Paul was first alerted to the whole topic by one of his parishioners who had been involved in the dumping, on his deathbed:
“Yes. Well, more accurately, he had only a few months to live. And he asked to see me, so we sat over a pint, and he told me about all this night-time dumping that had been going on in Telford at Stony Hill, and how a driver had got some yellow crystals on his hand, and his hand broke out into an immediate rash.
“The poor worker, he’d felt very uncomfortable about this dumping, and he’d gone to the site manager and said, ‘What’s going on?’, and the site manager just looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘You don’t want to go asking questions like that’.”
That was the start of it all, setting Paul off on his tireless campaign for truth. At what point did he realise that Freedom of Information was going to be useful?
“It’s been a steep learning curve. For the first few years, I very naively wrote to the various regulators, and they sent me their fob-off replies. And of course, there was nothing on the public record about that.
Putting information into the public arena
“So when I discovered WhatDoTheyKnow, it was a real breakthrough because I realised that if I asked authorities in public, they would realise that their responses were going to go on the public record. So they were less likely to lie to me. And with it being on the public record, future researchers could could follow up on stuff that I may have missed.
“I mean, it’s such a big subject. I suspect people in 50 years will be doing studies of what I’ve uncovered. Not to be pompous. I’m just being honest about the importance of it all.”
Paul soon realised he could do more on WhatDoTheyKnow than just lodge requests.
“Another benefit is that I can do searches on the relevant terms to see what other people have requested on the same subjects.
“But also, one of the lovely things has been to be able to put an enquiry with one regulator on WhatDoTheyKnow, and then forward that to another regulator to say, ‘You weren’t telling the truth, were you? Because these other people have said something so different’. That kind of-cross referencing has been incredibly valuable.
“That approach forced some information out of the Mines Remediation Authority, including the existence of some secret testing that had been done below the Stoney Hill site at Telford, which no one had told me about, so that was brilliant.”
But it hasn’t always been so easy.
Now you see it…
“A lot of the key lorry manifests from Telford, which was the first site I looked into, went missing. The Environment Agency’s Shrewsbury office had shown me them in person, proving that a lot of the dumping into this site in Telford had been done from the two Monsanto plants at Newport and Ruabon. And then when I asked to see them again, lo and behold, they’d gone missing.
“They said that they’d sent them to Telford Council, and Telford Council said, ‘We haven’t received them’. So I had two FOI requests, which said mutually contradictory things, and you just feel like locking the two parties in a room and saying come out when you’ve made your minds up!”
The discoveries are still coming.
“Only two weeks ago, we unearthed a 1,100-page document which shows that Telford Council have known all along how bad the site was, and that the site linings aren’t even non-porous because a cheap load of colliery spoil was used to line the bottom.”
Sometimes, the results of an FOI request have been quite surprising.
“I’d done a request about Cefn Mawr in North Wales — which features in the programme — and the answer came back with the information I’d asked for.
“But there was more information included, about the American Monsanto court case, and I thought, ‘That didn’t need to be included in the answer’. So, I believe a whistleblower managed to get out to me a piece of information that they knew I was looking for about an American court settlement. That’s somebody very honorable, who knows the significance of that document, and that’s why they’ve given it to me.”
As you can tell, Paul has been extremely meticulous and tenacious in his investigation. The circumstances of the toxic dumps haven’t made the job any easier, either:
“A lot of it was dumped at night, so isn’t recorded, and a lot of it was dumped in the early 1970s before the Control of Poisonous Waste Act came in, in ’74.
“So there was no stipulation to do it particularly carefully in most cases, and it’s left a really nasty legacy. A lot of the dumping was done in barrels, and the barrels are now rusting, so the stuff’s leaking out.
“A whole load of councils seem determined to avoid classifying the sites as contaminated land because they’re worried about obligations that they feel may be put upon them, and unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand that the legislation clearly says that if councils that own some of these sites aren’t able to pay, then the polluter can be approached to pay.”
What happens next?
Perhaps this TV programme will be a turning point, beginning to bring justice to the people and the communities that have suffered such severe health issues?
“If you see it as a chess match, I’d say that we’ve finished the end of the opening game, and we’re now moving into the middle game. Even this last week there’s been so much happening [We spoke to Paul just over a week after the programme first aired]. A legal firm is recruiting for for a major class action, so I’ve been giving them my contacts, especially people who’ve got cancers. And very sadly, there’s quite a lot of child leukemias turning up near the different sites, as well, which we didn’t include on the TV because it’s a bit heavy and a bit personal.
“A national newspaper is pursuing the idea of a series of features about things which we just touched on but didn’t have time to develop in this series.
“Plus we’re preparing for two judicial reviews. One of those is is likely to be a challenge against DEFRA for breaching the Stockholm Convention regarding persistent organic chemicals and pollutants; and the other one is against Caerphilly Council because they’ve issued a report saying that Ty Llwyd Quarry, which featured in the series, isn’t contaminated land — but they haven’t even tested the layby that’s known to have PCB in it, and they haven’t tested the river below the nearest village, Ynysddu, which we know from previous tests that there’s PCB in the bed of the river for at least three miles downstream. So, why aren’t they testing those miles downstream?”
Hopefully, this important work will continue to have significant outcomes. Many thanks to Paul for taking the time to share his remarkable investigation. If you’d like to help see justice done by the victims of the toxic waste dumping, look out for Paul’s crowdfunder page, coming soon — we’ll drop a link here as soon as it’s live.
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Image: Ilya Yakubovich
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The government is looking at whether public bodies should have more freedom to charge for access to their data, and we’ve responded to its call for evidence.
There are good reasons to be cautious about this. Peter Wells has written about some of them: charging reduces the number of people who can make use of public data, while adding new costs around licensing and administration.
In our fragmented public data report we recognise that public bodies can already spend considerable time publishing data without seeing much evidence of what happens to it afterwards. Where that data is difficult to find or combine, its potential value isn’t realised and the people doing the work have less reason to see publication as worthwhile.
Charging offers one answer to this, in that income is easy to demonstrate, but it decreases the overall value and impact of the data. We’d rather see the government get better at making the wider impact of open data visible: who uses it, what they build with it, where it is reused elsewhere in government, and what difference that makes. Better impact tracking would help teams make the case for investing in open data without needing to turn it into a source of income.
There’s also a longer-term problem with using charging to fund new data services. If a team is encouraged to generate income from its data and does so successfully, that income starts supporting the service. At that point, making the data open means finding the money somewhere else. The Postcode Address File is a longstanding example of how difficult this can be to unwind. Once licensing income becomes part of how a service is funded, opening the data and replacing that income become the same problem.
This is why we’re wary of encouraging individual public sector teams to become ‘entrepreneurial’ and develop their own income streams from data. If a new dataset turns out to be particularly useful, we’d rather that provided evidence for investing in it as shared infrastructure than a reason to keep charging for access to it.
The government has identified a real problem: it can be difficult to make the case for spending money on open data when the benefits are spread across lots of different organisations and users. We think this could be tackled through better shared infrastructure and impact tracking, rather than making public data pay for itself, which would only limit its reusability and lock it away in the long term.
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Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash
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Scrutinising governments’ use of AI is turning out to be one of the pressing demands of our time, so we’re very glad to have received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust that allows us to conduct meaningful and sustained work in this area. The project has already kicked off with fact-finding, consultation and exploration, and will culminate in the creation of a service for civil society, journalists, authorities — and individuals affected by AI-based decision-making.
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly used in democratic decision-making from welfare and healthcare to policing, with significant potential for both positive and negative impacts on individuals, society and the environment.
The effective use of data-driven AI systems in government and the public sector could transform the delivery of public services and support evidence-based policymaking, bringing benefits to citizens, saving costs and driving policy innovation across many domains.
But a data-driven algorithmic approach also has known risks, including that of reproducing or even amplifying unfair or discriminatory outcomes that are represented in the source data. We want to know how transparent evaluations of AI deployment in government can support both effective use and democratic accountability.
This is not an abstract question, nor one for a distant future. A recent LGA survey revealed that a significant percentage of local authority respondents are using AI in health and social care — 44% of them in services for adults, and 31% in services for children. Large Language Model (LLM)-based tools are being piloted across diverse applications in government, from social housing and planning to the DWP.
As a new generation of LLM AI systems come into use in which the rules of operation are not explicit, explanations of behaviour are challenging, and training data is not available, the need to both assess and demonstrate the fairness, performance and value of systems through adequate and transparent evaluation of their effectiveness and impact becomes much more important.
Across the two year span of this project, we’ll work with others to tackle the practical questions of how we collectively evaluate government AI systems and their impact in a way that supports fairness and benefits society as a whole. Based on this, we’ll go on to develop an accessible digital service, fostering transparency and accountability where AI systems are used.
That last bit is crucial: this is not just a research project. The initial discovery will ensure that the service is designed to be as effective as possible, with primary users being civil society organisations and journalists, alongside public authorities learning from their peers — but it will also be designed with public participation in mind, providing structured pathways for affected individuals.
We’ve started already. Last week, we shared the outcomes of a roundtable, the first activity in this project, helping us to understand what useful infrastructure already exists for scrutiny, where the gaps are, and where there are shared needs across civil society.
There’s plenty more to come: watch this space, and do sign up for updates (check “artificial intelligence” as an interest) to receive our newsletter direct to your inbox.
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Image: Jamillah Knowles & Digit via Better Images of AI (CC-by 4.0)
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Governing Freedom of Information in the UK
Tl;dr: the governance model of the ICO is changing and FOI isn’t well-represented in their new strategy. Here is how it could be made better.
Freedom of Information gives us the power to ask public authorities for information about their work. It has been used to uncover wrongdoing, scrutinise how public money is spent, and give communities the evidence they need to hold public bodies to account. Also, when public servants know that their decisions and records may be subject to public scrutiny, this can encourage better record-keeping and more accountable government in the first place.
Effective Freedom of Information systems require effective oversight. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has substantial legal powers, an experienced FOI team, and a well-established role in resolving complaints and improving public authority practice. However, there are longstanding questions about how FOI is governed within an organisation whose much larger responsibility is data protection.
The transition to the new Information Commission brings those questions into sharper focus. FOI plays a relatively small part in the proposed corporate strategy; specialist FOI expertise is not obvious within the new governance arrangements and the FOI function continues to depend on government funding at a time of increasing demand.
There are different ways these problems could be addressed. The new Information Commission can do more to give FOI strategic clarity, visibility and support within the combined regulator. Parliament can play a stronger role in scrutinising and supporting the FOI function, including how it is resourced. And, more fundamentally, FOI regulation could be separated from data protection altogether.
For an example of the last approach, we can already see this in the UK with the Scottish Information Commissioner (a dedicated regulator for the Scottish FOI system, appointed and funded via the Scottish Parliament). This arrangement does not need to be exactly replicated, but the new Information Commission needs to show how it can deliver the same kind of strategic clarity and agenda, and build a constructive relationship with Parliament on securing this important constitutional right.
If FOI remains within the new Information Commission, the challenge is to demonstrate how the combined model will deliver those conditions in practice.
What does effective FOI oversight need?
The existence of a legal right to information does not by itself guarantee effective access to information. FOI depends on an effective regulator.
Our 2022 Improving Oversight of Access to Information report looked at how information rights are regulated across Europe. It found that regulators need sufficient independence and resources to put their powers into practice, specialist knowledge of Access To Information law and practice, and good information about how the wider FOI system is working. This allows them not only to resolve individual complaints, but to identify where problems are occurring and intervene strategically.
The way a regulator is governed matters to its ability to do this. Its institutional purpose needs to be clear, expertise on Access To Information needs to inform its leadership and strategy, and its resources need to reflect the scale of the job it is expected to do. There also needs to be meaningful accountability for whether the regulator itself is delivering an effective FOI system.
These conditions are particularly important when FOI is one function within a much larger regulator. The Information Commission’s data protection responsibilities are substantially larger than its FOI role, with different funding arrangements, professional networks and regulatory priorities. Without deliberate arrangements to protect the strategic position of FOI, there is a risk that it becomes secondary within the priorities, governance and resources of the wider organisation.
This is the challenge facing the new Information Commission. It is not enough for the Commission simply to retain the ICO’s existing FOI responsibilities and powers. The new governance arrangements need to demonstrate how their FOI function will have the expertise and resources necessary for the regulator to use those powers effectively and improve the operation of the UK’s FOI system as a whole.
FOI within the new Information Commission
The new corporate strategy
FOI only plays a small part in the draft corporate strategy, and is not well-represented in the key strategic objectives.
There is a proposed objective for public authorities to be “transparent and provide public information openly and on time”. The suggested measurement framework also includes FOI compliance and complaints data, alongside qualitative evidence from FOI practitioners. Measuring the health of the wider FOI system is vital: our previous research demonstrates that regulators need to better understand more than just the complaints which eventually arrive with them.
However, considering the strategy more broadly, FOI is not well-represented. In particular, it is not always clear how the Commission’s wider strategic priorities and activities apply to its Access To Information responsibilities.
This may partly reflect the origins of the strategy itself. The Data (Use and Access) Act creates new requirements around the Commission’s strategy for data protection, while FOI legislation does not create an equivalent requirement for a dedicated FOI strategy. The ICO has previously operated with a distinct strategy for its FOI work; this should be revived.
FOI expertise within the new governance structure
The move from a single Commissioner to a Board creates new opportunities to bring a wider range of expertise into the organisation’s strategic governance. Seven non-executive members have now been appointed to the new Information Commission Board. They bring a range of experience; however, none of the members’ biographies identify specialist experience focused on information rights. FOI expertise is similarly not prominent in the published recruitment material for the new Chair.
It’s not necessarily the case that a seat on the Board needs to be reserved for an FOI specialist, but this does raise a practical question about how the Board will gather specialist Access To Information expertise and maintain strategic oversight of this part of the Commission’s responsibilities. Looking to Scotland, the Commissioner is appointed with a clear FOI remit and is expected to have experience with relevant legal/public sector matters.
Resources and independence
Funding is another longstanding issue for FOI within the ICO. Unlike much of the ICO’s data protection activity, which is funded through fees, its FOI responsibilities are supported through government grant funding. This creates an unusual relationship in which the resources available to enforce information rights against the government are ultimately determined through the government.
This has previously had practical consequences. In evidence to Parliament in 2021, the then Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham linked resource constraints to the ICO’s ability to take enforcement action, noting that its FOI funding had fallen substantially over the preceding decade. Our comparative research subsequently identified the UK as an example where a regulator has extensive formal powers but their practical ability to deploy them could be constrained by resources.
It is important to recognise that the ICO’s performance on FOI has improved in recent years. However, we must not take this progress for granted – and the ICO is currently warning that at its current funding level increased pressure on the complaints system is increasing the size of the backlog and delays before cases are allocated. Giving evidence to the House of Commons Procedure Committee, Warren Seddon (Director of Freedom of Information and Transparency) – highlighted the increase in volume and impact on response times:
In the last 12 months, we saw our intake increase by 16% in Q1, 38% in Q2, and then 60% in Q3 and Q4. That is in a context where, historically, over two decades of the FOI Act, you see a 20% to 25% increase every five years. We have seen a massive surge in the number of complaints in the system. Although the evidence is not there to pull that apart in detail, I think AI is probably driving that.
[..]In terms of the impact on performance and how the system is working at the funding levels that we are seeing coming in right now, there is a real concern from our perspective about where we will end up. We are projecting at the moment that, by the end of this financial year, it will take about 16 months to allocate a case, which is not good from our perspective.
In a response to an FOI request, the ICO highlighted both the increase in workload and that they have been unable to secure an increase in budget to reflect this:
[D]espite bidding for more resource to recruit more staff at the last Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), this was not successful. We continue to engage with government on this issue, but as a result, we currently anticipate allocation and wait times will continue to grow as approximately 400 excess cases a month are being added to our caseload.
Improvements to processes and technology may all help the regulator use its existing resources more effectively, but there is a limit to how far operational improvements can compensate for a sustained mismatch between workload and resources.
Responding to the Information Commission strategy
The current consultation on the Information Commission’s corporate strategy provides an immediate opportunity to strengthen the place of FOI within the new organisation.
The draft strategy includes an outcome focused on public authorities being transparent and providing information openly and on time, as well as proposals to use compliance, complaints and practitioner evidence to understand FOI performance.
However, it is less clear how these commitments connect to the wider strategy: how the Commission will use its regulatory powers and resources to achieve this FOI outcome, how progress will be scrutinised, and how the experience of people using FOI will inform its approach.
Proposals to strengthen the strategy:
- Explain how the corporate strategy applies to the Commission’s FOI work. The inclusion of an outcome on public authority transparency is welcome, but it is not always clear how the wider priorities in the strategy apply to the Commission’s Access To Information responsibilities. The final strategy should make clearer how the FOI outcome connects to regulatory priorities, activities, enforcement and resources.
- Commit to a dedicated FOI strategy. A more detailed Access To Information strategy sitting underneath the corporate strategy could explain how the Commission intends to approach casework, enforcement, systemic intervention, public authority compliance and the wider health of the FOI system.
- Measure the health of the FOI system from both sides. The proposed use of compliance, complaints and practitioner evidence is welcome. This should be complemented by evidence from requesters, alongside measures covering areas such as timeliness, disclosure, internal review and appeals. This would give the Commission a fuller picture of how FOI is working, beyond the cases that eventually reach it.
- Connect FOI ambitions to the resources required to deliver them. The Commission’s commitments on public authority transparency need to be supported by sufficient capacity within its FOI function. The final strategy should make clearer how the Commission will assess the resources required to meet its FOI responsibilities, particularly in the context of changing complaint volumes.
- Explain how FOI will be overseen within the new governance structure. With the move to a Board, the strategy could provide greater clarity about how specialist access-to-information expertise will inform decision-making and how the Board will scrutinise delivery of the Commission’s FOI responsibilities.
- Make engagement with FOI users and civil society more concrete. Continuing structured engagement with requesters, journalists, civil society and practitioners would give the Commission access to different perspectives on how the system is working in practice.
A stronger role for Parliament
Beyond the scope of the consultation, Parliament should play a greater role in supporting the independence and sustainability of FOI oversight.
Freedom of Information is a right created by Parliament, and the Information Commission is responsible for enforcing that right against public authorities, including the government itself. There is a reasonable argument that Parliament should have a stronger role in ensuring that the regulator has the resources it needs.
There are possible models (along the lines of the approach taken for the Electoral Commission) where a parliamentary committee rather than a government department is the sponsor. The ICO would submit an estimate for its FOI work to a parliamentary body, supported by independent audit and scrutiny, before the funding was approved through Parliament. This would help insulate decisions about FOI funding from the government whose compliance the ICO is responsible for regulating. It could also give Parliament a clearer role in scrutinising whether the ICO has the resources it needs, and how effectively those resources are being used.
There are precedents for this kind of arrangement. A number of independent constitutional and scrutiny bodies have funding arrangements involving parliamentary committees rather than conventional departmental sponsorship.
In Scotland, the Information Commission is funded through the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body and is subject to parliamentary scrutiny of both its resources and its performance. The Commissioner appears annually before the relevant parliamentary committee to discuss the office’s annual report and operational performance.
A separate FOI regulator?
One option for creating greater institutional clarity around FOI is to separate out the responsibilities for Access To Information and data protection.
The case for separation reflects the increasingly different scale and focus of the two functions. Data protection has developed into a much larger regulatory field, supported by an international profession and increasingly complex regulatory responsibilities. Within a combined regulator, there is a risk that the smaller FOI function has less influence over institutional strategy, leadership and resources.
A separate regulator would make responsibility for FOI explicit. It could provide a clear institutional purpose, specialist leadership and governance focused specifically on the effective operation of the FOI system. The Scottish Information Commissioner demonstrates some of the practical advantages of this clarity: there is an identifiable regulator with a specific FOI remit and a direct relationship with Parliament around its funding and performance.
Separation may not fix all issues automatically. Our comparative research found advantages to both specialist and combined oversight bodies. A larger combined regulator should, in theory, benefit from shared infrastructure, resources and greater institutional weight, while a separate regulator without sufficient resources or independence would not necessarily provide more effective oversight.
The important question is what institutional arrangements best deliver effective FOI regulation in practice. If responsibility for FOI remains within the Information Commission, the combined model needs to demonstrate how it will provide the strategic clarity, specialist expertise, resources and accountability that separation could provide more directly. Government and Parliament, in turn, need to ensure that the wider funding and governance arrangements make this possible.
Where next?
The creation of the Information Commission is an opportunity to strengthen the governance of FOI. There are actions that can be taken now within the new Commission, including giving FOI greater strategic clarity, making responsibility for it clearer within the new governance structure, and ensuring that its ambitions are matched by the resources needed to deliver them.
There is also a role for Parliament. Regardless of whether FOI continues to sit within a combined regulator or is ultimately separated from data protection, Parliament can play a stronger role in scrutinising the health of the FOI system and ensuring that its regulator has the independence and resources it needs. The government also has a responsibility to ensure that the wider regulatory and funding framework supports effective FOI oversight.
The Scottish Information Commissioner provides a useful example of how governance, funding and accountability can be aligned around a clear FOI purpose. If FOI is to remain within the new Information Commission, it should be clear how the combined model will provide the same kind of strategic clarity and focus, alongside a constructive relationship with Parliament that supports the effective protection of the right to information.
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Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash
