It was with immense sadness that the mySociety team learned of the death of our much loved ex-colleague Mark Longair.

Mark first came to mySociety as a volunteer, contributing his time and coding knowledge to build scrapers and parsers that brought Scottish Parliament data into TheyWorkForYou. Knowing a good developer when we saw one, we subsequently offered him a more official position, and he was a member of our permanent staff from 2012 to 2018.

During those years, he worked on a variety of our projects, helping to build brand new codebases from scratch, and contributing to existing ones, with his commits running through Mzalendo, Pombola, PopIt, EveryPolitician and TheyWorkForYou. One way in which his legacy lives on is in the elegant code he wrote for those projects, some of which continue to make transparency more accessible in the UK and in sub-saharan Africa.

He was also a dedicated volunteer with our friends at Democracy Club, making immense contributions — both in terms of hours dedicated and care taken — to their candidates crowdsourcing platform. This is a crucial piece of infrastructure for the digital democracy sector, and one we still benefit from ourselves, most recently when integrating election candidate data to the Local Intelligence Hub. And to many, Mark is best known as the originator of the UK’s only open geographical dataset of postcode boundaries, which also continues to find its way into mySociety’s mapping projects, even to this day.

He brought a remarkable level of care both to every aspect of his work, and to the connections he forged while working here. Words which are cropping up repeatedly as colleagues recall Mark include kind, humble, intelligent, remarkable, and generous. 

This generosity extended to the ways in which he shared knowledge: his clear and considerate explanations were a hallmark of any piece of work he contributed to; these often persist as a learning opportunity for anyone who returns to the code in later years. Mark was a naturally gifted teacher, both as a peer and mentor. 

He was a deep thinker about all aspects of life, reading widely and sharing what he discovered with colleagues; and he strove, especially, to improve the joy of working life for us all, with ideas and systems to make mySociety’s remote set-up more functional, agreeable and humane.

But he was by no means always serious — or perhaps one could say, he was equally serious about having fun. Contributions to the culture of mySociety include a karaoke habit that still persists; a lasting recognition of the importance of lunchtime naps; and his impassioned recommendations of Pixar films. Mark also introduced at least one colleague to the joy of cryptic crosswords, something he was serious enough about that he was a regular contributor to the blog Fifteen Squared.

After mySociety, Mark joined mySociety alumnus Robin Houston at Flourish, turning his considerable talents towards making data into compelling visualisations that brought out the underlying stories for all to see. 

The world is poorer for his not being in it; but richer for his long-lasting contributions to coding, and to all of us who were lucky to work with him or call him a friend. Contemporaneous colleague Steve Day and Democracy Club’s Sym Roe have also written tributes.

 

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Photo: Struan Donald

As part of our WhoFundsThem work we want to make better information available about money in politics. 

Last year we released a report Beyond Transparency – looking at the UK Parliament’s register of financial interests, and wider arguments about how we fund politics. 

Today we’re releasing a follow-up report: Leaky Pipes (read online or download as a PDF). This covers what we’ve learned (and what we think could be better) about the systems for reporting election donations. You can also re-watch the launch event on YouTube. 

This report started because we were a bit confused about the different ways data could be declared and reported.  And to be honest, we’re still a bit confused – but we have more diagrams to explain why. 

What we explore in this report are the multiple routes for declarations, different thresholds for disclosure, and uneven public access. This makes cross-checking difficult and leaves gaps where information can vanish depending on how a donation flows (direct to candidate vs via party), how large it is, and whether the candidate wins.

The result is that candidates and agents face complex reporting requirements, electoral administrators hold paper-heavy returns that are hard to inspect, and the public (and sometimes regulators) struggle to build a consistent picture of who is funding whom.

From this, we’ve made recommendations on making reporting easier to do correctly, faster to publish, and simpler to scrutinise:

• Move to a “report once” process that informs multiple systems
• Harmonise public disclosure at £1,000
• Create a comprehensive public database above that threshold
• Create a safe private database below the threshold for research and evaluation purposes

Building on this, we suggest three practical avenues for follow-up work that would strengthen the case for reform and help design better systems:

• User research and prototyping to map how a “report once” service would work for candidates, agents, administrators, Parliament, and the Electoral Commission. 
• Sampling local authority returns to demonstrate the scale and type of inconsistencies between routes.
• Exploring a data-sharing agreement for controlled research access to the Electoral Commission’s small-donor/return data.

The report can be read online or downloaded as a PDF.

Header image: Photo by Meg on Unsplash

When we consider the impacts of a project like the Council Climate Action Scorecards, the obvious benefits are those we see in UK councils as they step up their efforts to decarbonise. On this blog, we’ve also frequently noted tangential effects too, such as better understanding and communication between local authorities and residents.

There’s a third, less obvious benefit, though, as organisations across the world become aware of the project, and are inspired to do something similar. We saw it happen in Canada, and now The Climate Reality Project Europe has taken the idea and adapted it for their own community.

In this post, Gosia Rychlik, a branch manager at the organisation, explains what effects the Scorecards, a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety, have sparked in Europe.

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At The Climate Reality Project Europe, we work with a network of over 5,500 Climate Reality Leaders across the continent, supporting them to turn knowledge into local climate action. While covering the topic of climate emergency declarations and designing tools to help our community engage in the topic more effectively, we came across Climate Emergency UK’s work.

One of the projects was The Council Climate Action Scorecards: they immediately stood out as a transparent, methodic and very practical way to make local climate governance visible and accessible to citizens. The clarity of the methodology and the commitment to accountability deeply resonated with our mission. The project shows how citizens can help assess and encourage local climate action as informed citizens. 

A guidebook adapted for Europe

Inspired by Climate Emergency UK’s work, we created the City Climate Action Assessment Guidebook, launched in autumn 2025 as part of our Citizens for Clean Energy programme. The guidebook takes the idea behind the Scorecards and adapts it for cities across Europe. Despite the differences between datasets and local government systems, the need for transparency and accountability is the same everywhere.

The guidebook provides a clear and simple framework to help citizens see what their cities are doing and where more action is needed. We cover eight key areas: climate commitments, energy, transport, nature, community engagement, governance, and finance. It invites residents to observe, look for information, and start conversations with local councils. Our intention is to encourage citizens to take the first simple step toward better understanding and meaningful local action.

We launched the guidebook with a series of public webinars featuring Climate Emergency UK, Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate-KIC, reaching Climate Reality Leaders and community organisers from across Europe. 

What we’ve learned and what’s next

From the Scorecards, we learned that transparency and accessibility are key to accelerating local climate progress. We want to encourage citizens to start noticing climate policies (or lack thereof) in the real world and hope this will make them more likely to get involved, when they understand how to interpret their city’s plans and see where gaps exist.

We also learned that local engagement doesn’t always require large-scale campaigns — sometimes it begins with a few citizens paying attention, asking the right questions, and connecting dots between policies and lived experience.

Looking ahead, we hope that more members of our network take the first steps of local climate action with our Guidebook. Ultimately, our goal is the same as the one that inspired us: to empower citizens to hold councils accountable, celebrate progress, and accelerate the transition to climate-neutral, resilient communities.

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Thanks very much to Gosia for sharing these insights: we hope the guidebook has long-lasting and tangible effects.

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Image: Nuno Marques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

With WriteToThem.com we want to run a service that helps people write the right message to the right place. That means helping users express themselves effectively and keeping the service a constructive channel between constituents and representatives by deterring abusive messages.

Abuse and intimidation aimed at elected representatives does not just harm the person receiving it. It corrodes the openness and trust that democratic culture needs, and it can deter people (especially those from under-represented groups) from taking part in public life at all. 

We think we’re in a good position to play a constructive role in this area. One problem that has been raised is frustration at bouncing around layers of government, where a key benefit of WriteToThem is getting people to the right layer first. But we need to go further than that to understand how we can discourage abusive messages – both to directly implement approaches, and to trial patterns that could be implemented by a wider range of parliaments and local authorities.

We’ve been exploring what a “toxicity” risk score would look like in our infrastructure and have released a report of our findings so far. We trialled a range of options — from baseline keyword matching, to Google’s Perspective API, to running lightweight models locally (IBM Granite Guardian), and then to LLM-based grading as a second pass for tricky cases like implicit threats or messages quoting abuse from third parties.

But having a risk score is less important than how it is used. We’ve mapped out a few different approaches beyond a manual moderation approach – such as soft “nudge” prompts (encouraging people to reconsider wording before sending), cool-down delays for higher-risk messages (without removing someone’s ability to contact their representative), and informative flags for recipients (for example, passing along a risk score or relevant metadata on a message).

Our next step has mapped out some technical possibilities to talk to more people about which approaches make sense  – which we’ll be doing as part of our wider Welsh Government funded democratic engagement work to improve WriteToThem.

For more details on the approaches tested, potential issues with different methods of implementation, and unanswered questions, you can read the report online.

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Image: Pawel Czerwinski

Understanding more about constituent communication

We’ve released a new report exploring insights from WriteToThem about the content of constituent communication – you can read the whole report online or a summary below. 

WriteToThem.com is a long-running mySociety service that enables people across the UK to contact their elected representatives by entering their postcode and sending a message through the site.

This service provides a unique opportunity to understand the flow of communication between many constituents and many representatives. Our WriteToThem Insights report uses surveys to understand more about what people are writing about. 

 While previous work identified patterns in response rates and deprivation gradients, this experiment focuses on understanding what people are writing about, distinguishing between casework (individual problem-solving) and campaigning (policy-oriented advocacy).

A new survey and data-processing pipeline were developed to categorise and anonymise message summaries, applying machine learning and large language model techniques to cluster and label topics. Analysis of 5,400 messages from Q3 2025 found:

• Casework and campaigning form two distinct types of communication, with casework more common for councillors and campaigning dominant for MPs.
• The deprivation gradients of these two types differ sharply: campaigning is concentrated in less deprived areas, while casework is more evenly distributed, though likely still underrepresents the most deprived groups.
• First-time users are more likely to send casework messages and to receive responses.
• Top themes in casework include housing, local services, health, and anti-social behaviour; in campaigning, issues such as Gaza, climate policy, and digital ID predominate.

This data has limits. This covers only a portion of total correspondence, and with little information about whether the sample is representative enough to generalise to messages sent in general. That said, we think there are strong uses both for improving WriteToThem itself and for informing broader understanding of constituent communication.

We want to build on this work: refining the analysis process and exploring opportunities to collaborate. We see particular value in digging more into casework data as something that could inform more systematic approaches in this area, helping representatives across the country join up information and improve collective scrutiny of government services.

The full report can be read here.

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Image: Christopher Burns

Campaigning organisation and lobbying group the RBWM Climate Emergency Coalition (CEC), located in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, have been putting the Council Climate Action Scorecards to really good use.

Overall, 14 separate groups make up the CEC, who convene with a shared interest in mitigating climate change and/or protecting and restoring nature. The coalition holds the borough council to account in its stated goal to achieve net zero by 2050 and keep within its carbon budget, and we were pleased to hear all about it from someone involved from the very beginning, Paul Hinton.

Getting things started

First, he told us how the group had come into being:

“In March 2019, a local resident organised a series of climate protests at the town hall in Maidenhead, in response to Greta Thunberg’s solo school strikes outside the Swedish parliament and the establishment of the Fridays for Future movement.

“I attended the first protest with a copy of the Green Party toolkit ‘in my back pocket’, and suggested to some of the others present that we organise a campaign asking the council to declare a climate emergency. That’s how the CEC came into being.

“The campaign was a success. The climate emergency was declared in June 2019, although with a target of net zero by 2050 rather than the 2030 that we had campaigned for, and the borough’s first environment and climate strategy was adopted in December 2020, to run for five years to the end of 2025.

“The council is now developing the second version of its environment and climate strategy, to run until the end of 2035. The CEC is working hard to ensure that the new version is as ambitious as possible.”

Around the same time, Climate Emergency UK was just starting up, initially with the aim of collecting together every UK council’s climate declarations (out of which came CAPE, a joint project from CE UK and mySociety) — so there was an obvious shared interest right away, as Paul explains:

“Members of the CEC attended the first Climate Emergency Conference in Lancaster in March 2019 when it was a grassroots initiative led by Councillor Kevin Frea. We kept informed about CE UK’s activities, and were very pleased to see the genesis of the 2021 Scorecards, even though we didn’t make as much use of them as we might have.”

A long term relationship

There is value in understanding that campaigning for climate action may mean a long-term relationship with your local council. That’s not only because your message might take time to be heard; the campaigners themselves may be learning skills and knowledge. Paul explained that CEC have seen both successes and challenges, due to a number of different factors:

“The Scorecards have become extremely useful as we have gained experience and a better understanding of how to use them. In 2023, we produced an analysis of the RBWM’s climate performance for the newly elected Liberal Democrat council, based on the second iteration of the Scorecards; but there seemed to be no appetite to revisit the 2020-2025 strategy and the resulting action plan, and sadly this had very little impact.

“In 2025 we produced another analysis and report, this time based on the 2021, 2023 and 2025 Scorecards. This report has been extremely impactful for two main reasons. First, the analysis was based on three separate Scorecards results, and a clear trend was emerging so our arguments were stronger. Secondly, we shared the analysis more widely so that the message was more difficult to ignore.

“The report was shared with key cabinet members including the leader and deputy leader of the council. It was also shared with the steering group of the Climate Partnership (CP), a joint council/community organisation set up by the council to further the council’s net zero and nature recovery ambitions in the community. The CP were going to be involved in developing the new environment and climate strategy 2026-2035, and following receipt of the report became fully aware of how the borough’s climate action performance measured up against similar local authorities and what level of ambition would be required to reach their net zero target.

The CEC have played a long game, through changes of leadership and council majorities, seeing changes along the way:

“There have been frustrations over the years with the apparent lack of urgency and recognition of the scale of interventions needed across all council departments, but we have been pleased to see the council’s sustainability team grow, and whilst we recognise the challenges they face in terms of budgets, limited national government support, and perceived lack of a strong public mandate for climate action, we strongly believe that the new strategy should allow for a more ambitious approach, championing action, and providing the borough with clear goals commensurate with addressing the climate crisis.

“The CEC has a greater voice now than perhaps at any time since 2019, and it has been invited to a number of discussions and meetings with the current administration who appear to be much more receptive to the CEC’s input; this includes an upcoming dedicated workshop with council officers to input into developing the strategy and action plans.”

Press coverage

Paul mentioned that part of the CEC’s outreach activities involved sharing the report with the Maidenhead Advertiser, resulting in the publication of an in-depth article. We were interested to hear more about this, and how useful the group had found it to get coverage in the local press.

Paul explained, “The council is developing the second version of its environment and climate strategy, to run until the end of 2035, and we knew that we had to garner wider public awareness and support if they were going to recognise the need to create an ambitious, measurable and impactful strategy which would result in significantly increasing the pace and scale of the actions taken.

“The Maidenhead Advertiser was one of our chosen routes as we made a conscious effort to share our report widely and strategically. We shared a copy with the Editor and chief reporter, and they then wrote the story with one round of consultation with us.”

We wondered whether the CEC would advise other groups across the UK to try for coverage in the local press as a good campaign strategy. Paul thinks so:

“We’ve had no shortage of letters and articles published in the Advertiser, but for some reason a news story seems to have much more impact. The press provides us with the opportunity to inform the public when the council is not meeting the targets it has set itself; even while we continue to work constructively together with councillors and officers.

“Coverage in the local press should always form part of a good campaign strategy, but is even more impactful if used as one of a number of options and routes for getting the message out. Some of the data in the Scorecards is quite technical, and so difficult for those less familiar with it to fully appreciate, so in future we’d also look at issuing a press release in addition to the report itself, covering the main points.”

Thanks to all the CEC’s activity, their report has been shared far and wide — but it had a secondary effect: the council also saw how useful the Scorecards could be in their own work. Paul says that the council have adopted them at community workshops to highlight priority areas for action.

We are glad to hear it — and grateful to the RBWM CEC’s great efforts in putting the Scorecards to good use. Thank you to Paul for sharing his experiences.

 

 

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Image: Tom Bastin (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Around the world today, organisations and communities are recognising the 26th International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This is a moment to reflect on one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world – but it’s also a call to action.

As one small action in that continued effort, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) this year, to explore how something like our Local Intelligence Hub could help their members organise for change.

Little did we expect that, in building a prototype Data Hub for them to explore their needs, we’d discover a gaping hole in data collection about the safety of girls at schools in 16% of local authorities.

But first, what were we aiming to achieve?

In a post last month, I shared some of the goals of this work – such as using data to galvanise support from MPs, to monitor patterns that official bodies might miss, and to help EVAW’s members make the case for increased local funding to address violence against women and girls (VAWG).

I also shared how we were using the batch request tools in WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (our advanced Freedom Of Information service) to generate new public data on VAWG prevalence in schools.

And, of course, all of this work builds on top of the Local Intelligence Hub we designed and built with The Climate Coalition and Green Alliance – which has already proved its worth as a tool for community organising and public affairs, including through events like this Summer’s #ActNowChangeForever Mass Lobby, and The Climate Coalition’s Great Big Green Week.

Now it’s time for an update – how did we get on?

A replicable pipeline of brand new VAWG data

When we built the Local Intelligence Hub with The Climate Coalition (TCC), much of the data we included was already publicly available: MP information from Parliament, demographic data from the ONS, public opinion data shared by polling companies. Combined with TCC member organisations’ own data on their local support and activities, the Hub was able to present a nuanced picture of climate and nature are being protected across the whole country.

We knew we faced a different challenge with the VAWG data hub. As I explained last month, public data in this space is often incomplete, or missing entirely. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to test how WhatDoTheyKnow and the Local Intelligence Hub could work together to generate and then publish brand new datasets on VAWG prevalence or activity, made public through FOI requests to local authorities and policing bodies.

We chose school safeguarding referral figures as a suitably challenging example that was also indicative of levels of risk to children. When school staff fear a child may be in danger in any way, they are meant to refer it to the safeguarding team at their local authority. The UK government collects some information about these referrals as part of its Children In Need census, but the definition of a “child in need” is somewhat open to interpretation, and we and EVAW both suspected that, as a result, the official data was only telling part of the story. The census also only covers local authorities in England, leaving Scotland and Wales to collect their own, incompatible data (the CRCS census in Wales, and Children’s Services Plans in Scotland).

With the help of the WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers, we drafted an FOI request to be sent to every UK local authority with a responsibility for education, asking for three things:

1. The total number of safeguarding referrals made to them, by schools in their area – this is data that technically should be collected by the CIN census for English authorities, but we suspect is not
2. Any sort of categorical breakdown they held about those referrals, such as a breakdown of the genders of the children involved – this doesn’t currently appear in any public dataset that we know of
3. The total number of schoolchildren in their area

You can browse the requests and responses on WhatDoTheyKnow. Here are some key things we learned through the process:

No matter how much you research your request, something will slip through

Our background research and even our first pilot requests failed to reveal that the total number of schoolchildren is something that’s already published for England, Scotland, and Wales. Thankfully, many authorities simply pointed us to this data (with a “Section 21” refusal – “information already accessible”), but others continued to provide the data for each year we requested. Had we known in advance that the data was already available to us, we could have left it out of our requests to English, Scottish and Welsh authorities. We can only hope, since this is such basic information, the authorities who did go on to provide the data to us didn’t spend too long gathering it.

You will receive information in every format imaginable, and your data extraction process needs to handle that

We asked for responses to be provided in a “re-usable, machine-readable format” if the authority deemed the information to meet the FOI Act definition of a ‘dataset’. We think, in reality, very few of the authorities held this data in a format structured enough to count as a ‘dataset’, but a few did send over their data in spreadsheet format, which was nice to see! Others, however, sent us tables in Word documents, in PDFs, SharePoint links, even ASCII-art tables in raw email text.

We also knew authorities might hold the information by calendar, academic, or financial reporting year, so we gave them the freedom to provide it to us in whichever scheme they had. Unsurprisingly, we received responses across all three (57% calendar year, 35% financial year, 8% academic year).

Happily, the crowdsourcing interface in WhatDoTheyKnow Projects enabled us to make relatively quick work of extracting the data we needed, but we were ultimately only able to extract a fraction of the information some authorities provided and we found that some of the interpretation of the responses (ie: “is this a financial year, or an academic year?”) heavily relied on human intuition, which means we’ll need to think carefully about the way we structure future requests, if we want to process the data through any sort of automated pipeline.

Complex requests are a risk

The more information you request, the more useful it might be to you, but the more you risk the public authority refusing to answer it on “Section 12” cost grounds. WhatDoTheyKnow’s advice is to keep your request as short and focused as possible. But we knew that historical data, across a few metrics and a few years, would be most useful to the VAWG Data Hub’s users, so we asked for as much as we felt we could justify – and it mostly paid off.

70% of responses to our batch request contained both key pieces of data we wanted (the total referrals for multiple years, and the gender breakdown). Another 7% contained just the yearly totals, without any gender breakdown.

7% are still awaiting a response, even now, over a month after the statutory deadline. And 6% of authorities said they didn’t hold the information at all (because they, surprisingly, don’t record the referrals they receive). Which leaves 10% who refused our request on cost grounds. If our request had been simpler, this number of refusals would likely have been smaller.

However, this result is in itself interesting: at least 16% of local authorities responsible for handling safeguarding referrals either don’t record them, or record them in such a way that it would take more than 18 hours of officer time to report how many they received in a given year, or how many relate to girls.

If the government is serious about halving violence against women and girls within a decade, this is precisely the sort of data local authorities will need at their fingertips, in order to monitor progress and allocate resources. The fact that it’s effectively inaccessible to 16% of them right now is a worry.

Combining data for new patterns and new questions

Remember how I mentioned we were adapting the Local Intelligence Hub for EVAW’s needs?

With our FOI data extracted through WhatDoTheyKnow, we were able to very quickly load it into a prototype VAWG Data Hub. Alongside it, we loaded in a whole new area type to filter by—“Policing areas” or Police & Crime Commissioners—as well as some examples of crime prevalence data (the number of reported VAWG-related incidents, by policing area) and public policy guidelines data (the Council Of Europe’s recommended minimums for VAWG service provision).

Thanks to my colleague Alex’s improvements to our TheyWorkForYou Votes infrastructure, we were also able to make quick work of importing VAWG-related MP data into this new hub – including VAWG-related parliamentary groups that MPs might be sitting on, or relevant votes and motions they’d supported.

Plus, of course, there was all the usual MP and area data that campaigners and public affairs teams have already found so useful on the Local Intelligence Hub – things like election results, public attitudes polling, and income and poverty indicators.

Data in action

With the data in place, it was possible for us to give EVAW’s member organisations a demonstration of how they could use a data hub like this as part of their campaigning, fundraising, and policy influencing work. For example, to find the council areas with the most school safeguarding referrals for girls and also the highest overall deprivation:

Or to find the MPs with the strongest support for VAWG prevention, but in constituencies with high VAWG prevalence:

All of the data we demonstrated this Autumn is still a work in progress, but it was reassuring to see almost 70% of members on a recent demo call saying that a VAWG data hub like this would “definitely” be useful to them in their day-to-day work.

We look forward to honing the VAWG Data Hub further with EVAW and their members, to make sure we’re asking the right questions, and presenting an accurate picture of the VAWG landscape.

Header image: Khyati Trehan, for Google Deepmind – Pexels Free License.

Do you live somewhere that boasts a magnificent municipal clock — a timepiece that anyone passing by can look up to, and check that they’re nicely on time for their next appointment? A vast clockface on the side of the town hall, perhaps; or a golden clocktower standing tall above the shopping streets…a landmark under which to meet friends?

OK, good. The next question is: does that clock actually work? 

If its hands have come to a solid halt; or it’s running at a dogged twenty minutes behind time; or its rusted chimes, once mellifluous, now sound more like the rasping call of an imperilled frog, the chances are that it’s been logged on the Stopped Clocks website.

Here you can see which clocks near you have fallen into disrepair; or check the time, which is delivered to you along with an apposite poem.  

The site is the work of Alfie Dennen, who describes himself as “somewhere between a technologist and an activist — with a tendency towards action over academics”.

It’s not entirely out of character, as he explains: “I’ve been building things for the web that blend activism and tech since the late nineties: for example We’re Not Afraid was a project that spoke to London’s — certainly my — defiance after the bomb attacks of 7/7; and Bus Tops was a project for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad which aimed to democratise both access to and the creation of public art.”

Nor has the project sprung up overnight. It all began with Alfie’s realisation that he could become the clock-winder that kept his own local clocktower, in North London’s Caledonian Park, ticking.

“Restarting the Cally clock in 2012 cemented for me that both documenting, and hopefully one day restoring, public clocks was a worthwhile thing to spend some significant portion of my life doing.”

Now, this is a very mySociety-type project, blending coding, community, and a sense of shared responsibility. We probably would have written about it anyway. But also, in gathering the data he needed, Alfie made substantial use not just of Freedom of Information through our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro service, but also our MapIt points-to-boundaries software — so we have all the more reason to ask him all about it.

To begin with, how did he realise that FOI might be a good tool to help with the site?

As you’ll see if you click around, the project crowdsources information — so if you know of a local clock that hasn’t been included, you can add it yourself. To identify which council area they sit within (see the map page here), Alfie had been using MapIt to generate boundary information.That gave him a vague awareness of mySociety and our other services, including WhatDoTheyKnow.

“I’d never used FOI before, but I realised that it’d be a great way to get baseline data over and above the data I can gather about stopped clocks directly — given that walking every street in the UK is a bit out of my current comfort zone!

“When I went to look at WhatDoTheyKnow properly, I released that I could send FOI requests in a batch, and that got me super enthused. Suddenly the looming month-long period of finding spare time to do them one by one disappeared! WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch process, and clear interface to manage status as they were responded to, has been such a useful tool for me.”

Great — so, having sent off lots of requests, has Alfie seen any responses yet?

“The deadline for responses was the 21 November for most of the requests, but there’s still hope that some more will come in. 

“So far, of the 308 councils I contacted, 107 have given substantive responses. 70 councils responded to say they held “no information” and 113 are delayed or still pending. Between them, they identified 231 council-managed clocks, of which 175 are working, 34 have stopped, and 22 have an unknown status. 

“So about 15% of council-managed clocks are stopped, which honestly is better than I expected. But here’s the thing that really stood out: when I cross-referenced this with my database of 243 stopped clocks, it turns out that only about 40 are actually council-managed. The vast majority (so far) — 84% — are outside of the scope of Freedom of Information as they are in private hands, or owned by churches, or other bodies that used to be public but aren’t any more. In this sense, privatisation has created a clear accountability gap.

“The responses have varied greatly, which is interesting in itself. Some councils sent back detailed spreadsheets detailing every clock they manage, with maintenance schedules, budgets  — the lot. Some look after lots of clocks, while others have none at all — apparently. Only 6.4% of councils could tell us what they spend on clock maintenance. Of these, the average maintenance cost was £2,929/year.

So, curiosity aside, how will all this data be put to use?

“A big part of why I’ve been doing this foundational research through FOI requests is to provide a backbone to a book I’m writing, which looks at the last 45 years of austerity in the UK through the somehow very human lens of stopped public clocks. 

“Yes, stopped clocks are a small thing in the round when we look at all the issues facing our communities, cities and civic spaces today.

“But they’re also the perfect way to talk to people about how they feel about their town, their neighbourhood, their city. Ultimately this is my main aim: reaching people where they are to talk about re-engaging with our civic space, coming together and understanding each other and our built spaces in ways we once did but have lost sight of.

“The civic infrastructure which once supported the maintenance of public clocks has been systematically stripped away through a combination of privatisation and austerity dating back to 1979. 

“But I wanted the data to be useful beyond just the book, so I’ve built it into the Stopped Clocks website as an interactive policy tab. You can see the map of all FOI-tagged clocks, filter by ownership type, and read through the timeline of disinvestment.

“More practically, it means when someone finds a stopped clock in their town and wonders, “who’s supposed to be looking after this?”, maybe they will find the answer on the site. And if they want to campaign to get it fixed, they’ve got evidence: council responses, maintenance data, the broader context of how we got here.”

Each clock boasts a number of tags, so for example you can see which data came through FOI requests, and which council area they’re in — that part is thanks to MapIt.

“I’m also tagging clocks with their ownership type, which is a somewhat manual process; and whether they’re on listed buildings, using the Historic England API. 

“Tagging lets us start seeing clearer patterns, like how Lottery-funded church restorations from the 90s are failing on a very predictable timeline, or how privatised civic buildings — former town halls, libraries — now in commercial hands are disproportionately neglected.”

And so finally, what plans does Alfie have for the project? Presumably he has a strong incentive to avoid the irony of its becoming an untended asset itself.

“I can see a path towards a Stopped Clocks charitable foundation that does two things at once: gets clocks running again, and uses that process to rebuild civic engagement at the local level. 

“Because here’s what happens when you try to fix a stopped clock: you immediately find out who owns it, who’s responsible for it, why it stopped, why nobody’s fixed it. And that leads you straight into conversations about council budgets, privatised buildings, who decides what gets maintained and what doesn’t.

“It’s a way into talking about austerity and privatisation that doesn’t feel abstract or preachy. It’s just there, on the town hall, stopped. 

“People care about these things; they notice them every day, they remember when they worked. That gives you something to organise around that’s tangible and achievable. 

“Fix one clock, learn how the system works — or doesn’t; build the relationships and knowledge to tackle the next one.”

Many thanks to Alfie for talking to us about this project: we hope it inspires others to think differently about the assets that make up our public domain — perhaps even to ask if you can be the person who winds your own local clock.

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Image: Kelsey Todd

 

Mayors and combined authorities are the future of devolution in England,  but the ways in which citizens can understand, scrutinise, or influence them remain unclear.

Our latest report, Mayoral scrutiny: supporting an ecosystem of accountability organisations, argues that devolution will not deliver on its promises unless we also invest in new forms of civic and democratic oversight. It is not enough to create powerful new Mayors; we need to create the ecosystem that holds them (and the wider web of regional institutions) to account.

Why scrutiny matters

Combined authorities are designed to bring councils together to plan and deliver across a region. But unlike the London model, they do not have an elected assembly meant to hold the mayoral executive to account.

Existing models, such as council scrutiny committees or parliamentary hearings, can only go so far. Combined authorities need scrutiny that reflects the full complexity of their networks and partnerships.

A scrutiny and civic development fund

We highlight two complementary approaches already being explored:

• Local Public Accounts Committees (LPACs): technocratic bodies that examine how public services work together across a region, looking not only at the Mayor’s decisions but at value for money and collaboration across agencies.
• Democratic journalism funds: public-interest media funds guided by citizens’ assemblies, ensuring independent, locally relevant journalism that supports democratic life.

We propose bringing these ideas together in a new Scrutiny and civic development fund: a local grantmaking body with priorities set by a citizens’ assembly. The fund would support a mix of civic institutions — from expert-led scrutiny committees to independent journalism — that together strengthen public accountability and regional identity. Approaches along these lines would help ensure that devolution does not just move power geographically, but makes it genuinely more responsive to the people it serves.

Supporting existing scrutiny

This report also explores ways we could apply our existing tools and approaches to sustain and connect the accountability ecosystem that already exists. Through tools like MapIt, TheyWorkForYou, and WhatDoTheyKnow, we can build a civic democratic stack to support journalists and civic technologists to understand and monitor combined authorities.

We’ll also continue to explore how civic tech can make these new layers of governance more transparent, and how data and digital infrastructure can support the work of local scrutiny.

Read the full report

The report explores the history of scrutiny in English devolution, how these proposals could work in practice, and sets out the steps to strengthen the civic fabric around mayors and combined authorities. You can read it here. 

Header image: Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash