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

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

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

Thematic groupings

The four topics discussed were:

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

FOI expansion

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

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

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

AI as opportunity and challenge, and proactive / better publication

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

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

Practical difficulties/support for FOI within public bodies 

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

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

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

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

Government opposed to/has a lukewarm attitude towards transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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Image: Mark Fletcher-Brown

We’ve just started a new project exploring how improved data and training could help youth services in England – building their financial sustainability and representing their communities at a national policy level.

Working with the Social Investment Business (SIB), which coordinates the government’s Youth Investment Fund, we’ll be talking to youth organisations across the North of England between now and July, to understand what challenges they face with coordinating action, demonstrating support, and evidencing impact for fundraising.

Through a short series of interviews, workshops, and free online training sessions, we’ll find out together where there might be opportunities to build these organisations’ capacity for data analysis and engagement with public authorities.

We’ve already seen how climate and nature organisations have used the Local Intelligence Hub to identify local partners, compare approaches nationally, and prepare for conversations with their councillors and MPs. Through this project, we’ll get a chance to explore whether that same model could help organisations in the youth sector to build stronger partnerships and deliver their services more effectively.

Nick Temple, SIB CEO, said: “One of the key challenges we hear from youth organisations is how hard it can be to evidence their impact while juggling frontline delivery. This project with mySociety gives us a valuable opportunity to explore practical ways that data, insight and shared learning can support organisations to grow stronger, collaborate more effectively, and make their voices heard—building on the legacy of the Youth Investment Fund for the long term.”

We’ll be inviting current and former YIF grantees to get involved, via SIB’s network, shortly.

But if you’re a youth organisation in the wider sector and would like to find out more about the project, or how your organisation could make the most of mySociety’s other tools like TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow, you can still be involved – just get in touch!

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

What’s the problem?

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

What people are saying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Generative AI is good at solving some kinds of problems, and bad at solving others. With the rush to apply AI approaches across the public and private sector, we want to encourage people to use the right tool for the right problem. This blog post proposes a test that makes it easy to understand whether or not the applications are genuinely beneficial for the job in hand.

Generative AI has no concept of truth. It is designed to create outputs that are internally consistent, and this might or might not coincide with true things when the training data and context are well aligned. By now, we’ve all heard examples of false-positive hallucinations, where AI has asserted that something exists or was said because doing so is internally consistent with the question — but which turns out not to be true. Depending on the application, if unchecked, this can have catastrophic effects, meaning that validation of outputs is essential.

How to assess your project for AI suitability

In our recent Shifting Landscapes report, we shared a simple matrix that helps to assess how useful it is to apply an AI approach to any given problem.

It asks how hard/expensive is it currently to produce a solution without AI, and how hard/expensive is to verify that the solution is correct, with four potential outcomes:

Let’s look at each possible outcome in turn:

1. Weak AI benefits (which may increase at scale)
producing a solution is cheap / verifying the solution is cheap

This applies to tasks where AI tools might help people complete tasks more efficiently, but where the resulting impact or time savings are not significant. Over time/mass use, the benefits might increase.

Examples here include tasks like letter-writing and making summaries of documents or transcripts. If AI can do the initial grunt work, a human can take over and make tweaks to the output, nominally saving some time.

In our own field of civic tech, we can see this kind of tool being used to help people navigate bureaucracy: it might help format letters to representatives, or make effective appeals when FOI requests are refused.

Cheap processes at scale can also unlock new collective benefits. For instance, Muckrock uses LLMs to extract information and success/fail status from individual FOI responses. Doing this manually per request is easy for people, but requires lots of people to do the work to create a useful dataset across the entire corpus. An AI approach drops the costs further, which produces a small benefit on an individual scale, but collectively creates useful data.

As we note in our AI Framework, we have to recognise that a large number of small uses can build up into a negative effect. For instance, AI-created objections to planning applications might overwhelm a system that was built for a world in which there are higher hurdles to lodging an objection.

2. Significant AI benefits
producing a solution is expensive / verifying the solution is cheap

In this scenario, we’re thinking of situations where it is harder for a human to create a credible solution than it is to check if the outputs are valid. Conceiving a solution might be hard because it requires specialised knowledge, such as coding, or significant time and resources, like the analysis of a huge dataset; but it would be easy for a human to see whether or not the solution is working as intended.

One of the biggest practical uses of AI so far has been seen in coding, because coding problems fit so well into this category, and so provide potential benefits. The structure of computer code is often formally checkable (for at least syntax errors), and often there is a relatively short turnaround between “having code” and “checking the code is effective”. This isn’t to say that all coding fits in this box, but enough that a clearly productive set of tools exists. 

There are strong potential benefits here because an expensive process can be made cheaper, while the quality of the output can be checked through relatively cheap verification methods.

This segment of applications can be impactful even where access to models is relatively expensive, as a relatively small number of LLM users can have a big impact through the products that emerge.

3. Get a human to do it
producing a solution is cheap / verifying the solution is expensive

Some LLM processes produce outputs that cannot be quickly verified by automatic or human means.

Here, using an LLM for the initial solution might be less effective than having a human do it from the start.  While tweaking an email that contains slightly poor wording is a cheap correction, adjusting a multi-page report written by an LLM (involving fact checking, correction, restructure, etc) might be more complicated than just having someone write the original work.

When humans approach a piece of work like this, the production and verification processes pretty much happen at the same time, because the skills required to produce the work are the same ones that suggest the work is valid. 

“Use a human” is often most clearly the sensible approach for projects that need a high level of accuracy and confidence in the material produced. For example, we talked to OpenFun about their LawTrace site, which brings together legislative information in Taiwan. They made a point of choosing not to use AI at all in this project. Having accurate information was far more important to users than any convenience AI could introduce.

4. Break down the verification problem
producing a solution is expensive / verifying the solution is expensive

Sometimes solutions are expensive for a combination of reasons, and this can justify investment in trying to split the verification problem into smaller problems. 

Through a sequence of different checks on LLM output, we can move problems towards being strong uses of AI, because it dramatically reduces the time needed to produce the solution, while the verification costs are manageable. 

As an example, our APPG scraper sits in this category. We wanted to get accurate lists of parliamentary group memberships from dozens of different websites. Our original idea was that we would need to use a crowdsourcing approach, because we thought an LLM would be vulnerable to inventing lists of MPs. 

But after some consideration, we invested time in a step where we could verify with code whether or the names extracted were actually listed on the relevant sites. We can see a similar example in the public consensus platform Pol.is – where category descriptions are linked back to concrete sources to facilitate easier double checking. 

Similarly, you might find that aspects of your problem (if not the whole problem) are appropriate for mechanical checking. Could LLM code make a custom verification process easier? Can a series of automatic/human checks be made more efficient with a clear verification workflow? Each individual improvement moves your project closer to being a potentially strong use of AI.

Investment in the verification process might move the problem closer to having weak/strong AI benefits, where outputs can be derisked through cheap quality checks — but you’ll only know through systematically breaking it down in this way. 

We hope that, by sharing this matrix, we will encourage more thoughtful deployments of AI technology in governments  and beyond. Please feel free to share it with those who will find it useful.

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This blog post has been adapted from our report Shifting Landscapes – A practical guide to pro-democratic tech.

Image: Leo Lau & Digit (CC-BY 4.0)

Key points

• Lowering the cost limit time would reduce the scope of the Freedom of Information Act, giving government departments greater leeway to deny requests.
• This  will have a disproportionate effect on high-impact Freedom of Information requests made by journalists and researchers. 
• It represents a new restriction on public scrutiny of government, counter to promises around improved government transparency, such as the promised roll-out of FOI to contractors providing government services. 
• It is unlikely to significantly reduce the volume of work required to process requests – local governments also receive a comparable volume of requests at a lower cost limit, and there are administrative costs even if a request is rejected under a new, lower cost limit. 
• Transparency is not a nice extra to have that can be cut when the budgets are tight. Governments that think they cannot afford transparency will be surprised at the corruption and inefficiency they will need to afford in its absence.
• The actual solution to volume is improved government processes. Reducing the cost limit might increase admin burden on authorities (due to increased back and forth with requesters) whereas better proactive publication genuinely could reduce volume of requests by removing the need to request in the first place.

What’s being proposed?

A policy is being floated, around decreasing the FOI cost limit in order to address an increase in the volume of requests. 

Financial Times: UK considers FOI clampdown as requests soar:

British officials are considering a clampdown on the freedom of information system in a move that would spark backlash from transparency campaigners.

Government figures are discussing a reduction in the cost ceiling for processing a request as the number of annual submissions has spiralled, according to people familiar with the situation.

The soaring number of requests comes against a backdrop of heavily constrained Whitehall budgets, they added.

There are no further details beyond this briefing. Our assumption is that the proposal is for a reduction to the central government cost limit (see below), but with no details on the scale implied. 

As reflected in the FT story, because of central government statistics, we can see that this increase mostly relates to defence records being moved to the National Archives. It is also worth putting in the context of a separate attempt to justify restrictions based on national security. 

What is the cost limit?

The “appropriate limit” is the time allowed to deal with an FOI request. 

At the start of the FOI process, a cost is estimated for the likely time it will take to locate, retrieve and provide the requested information (but not time taken in doing public benefits tests or applying redactions). 

It has a value in cash, but this is pegged against a set cost per hour (£25 an hour in UK FOI, £15 in Scottish FOI).  So effectively this is a time allowed in hours:

• £600 (40 hours) – Scottish FOI
• £850 (34 hours) – Parliamentary questions
• £600 (24 hours) – Central government FOI
• £450 (18 hours) – Other public bodies FOI

A related part of the rules is that authorities can aggregate similar requests (for similar information by connected people and made within 60 working days) and apply the cost limit to them collectively. Authorities may interpret this quite broadly if the requests share an overarching theme or are handled by the same team. 

Another relevant system is parliamentary questions, where the search time is pegged to 140% the cost limit for central government. The resulting ceiling is £850 (34 hours). 

How are the cost limits changed?

The cost limits for UK FOI are set by The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. 

A new set of regulations could be made without a vote in Parliament.  The cost limits are changed via a statutory instrument passed by the negative procedure. This means the government lays the change before Parliament, and it automatically becomes law without a vote. 

MPs can sign a petition to call for a vote to annul it, but there is no automatic threshold where a certain number of signatures requires a vote. Generally it requires support of the official opposition to get a debate. 

What would be the effect of reducing the cost limit?

The likely effect of reducing the cost limit would be to prevent a class of currently useful and productive FOI requests, without significantly reducing volume or administrative costs. 

Who would this affect the most?

As the existing cost limit already rules out very broad requests, the change in any reduction would fall mostly on the most complex requests allowed by the current rules – and as such is likely to disproportionately affect journalistic and researcher use of FOI. Exploratory requests would need to be framed more narrowly, and a lower limit combined with the aggregation rule would make it easier for authorities to chain related requests together and deny them.

Any reduction in the central government cost limit would also have a knock-on effect on parliamentary questions, as the search time is linked. 

Would it reduce administrative costs?

This change would have a mixed effect on administrative costs: marking a bigger set of FOI requests as invalid has costs of its own. 

Reducing the cost limit would give more leeway to authorities to refuse requests when the documents requested are difficult to provide, but would be targeting a narrow band between what was previously acceptable and the new limit.  A lower threshold invites more dispute about the threshold, and requires justification for it falling in a narrow range, potentially causing more back and forth with requesters. What should happen in these cases is that authorities give advice and assistance on reducing the scope of the request to help fit inside the cost limit. Failing to do this has been noted in ICO decision notices about whether the exemption was applied correctly. As such, administrative savings are likely to be disappointing, as a lower cost limit creates work of its own. 

The natural experiment of the two different cost limits also does not suggest reducing would have a large effect on volume. The lack of comprehensive FOI stats means we do not have an up-to-date figure, but in 2017, local and central governments had comparable volumes of average FOI requests – despite the difference in the cost limit. 

What is a better approach to FOI volume?

Increased FOI volume raises the importance of efficient discovery and publication of information. Rather than reducing public transparency, public authorities should invest in their own processes and data to better meet internal and external needs. 

Public authorities need to be good at managing information — not just to answer FOI requests, but in order to work effectively. The effect of improved technology should be to make it easier for authorities to understand the information they hold, both for their own purposes and for public transparency.

More value can be realised by each FOI request released through improved disclosure logs. WhatDoTheyKnow.com removes the need for future FOI requests by making previous requests easier to find, with far more users of the site viewing information that has been published in previous FOI responses rather than making new requests. Public authorities can help reduce duplicate requests by publishing disclosure logs that make information released available to search engines (including AI agents), delivering more impact to releases and reducing repeated costs. This also helps address the social cost of atomised AI approaches: information is released for public benefit. 

Building on this, authorities can also learn from the subjects about  which  FOI requests are frequently made, and use that to inform their proactive publication of information. Increased volume of requests represents people making use of their information rights: this should be encouraged, while trying to make the process of finding and publishing information as efficient as possible. 

Transparency isn’t a cost: it’s a necessary investment for the rewards of reduced risk of corruption, and improved quality of work through the deterrent effect of future transparency. Efforts to cut costs could instead focus on the cost of secrecy— the high legal fees government departments have paid to try and keep secret information in the public interest. Government and parliamentarians should be invested in making this system work well, for the public benefit, rather than restricting access. 

Read other responses

• George Greenwood on Relight My FOIA blog on the security arguments being made
• Jenna Corderoy from Democracy for Sale on the money the government spends fighting transparency cases
• Claire Miller discusses cost limits in her weekly FOI news roundup
• Sunday Times – Our secrecy-addicted state is at it again. It must be stopped
• The Times – Curbing our right to know would be a blow to democracy

Header image: Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Our latest TICTeC work to help improve the impacts of civic technology takes its form in a collaboration with Sitra (the Finnish Innovation Fund). Together, we are exploring the development of a proposed European Civic Tech Hub.

As part of the Democracy Shield, the European Commission has committed to creating a European Civic Tech Hub as part of boosting societal resilience, citizens’ engagement and European digital sovereignty. 

Sitra is currently investigating what this hub could look like in practice, with the aim of addressing key barriers to civic tech adoption across the EU. As part of this work, we are helping them to engage with the civic tech and democratic innovation community, gathering insights, testing ideas, and identifying what would be most valuable for practitioners.

We hope by doing this, the perspectives of civic tech and democracy practitioners will be taken into account by the European Commission when planning the Civic Tech Hub and future civic tech initiatives.  And ultimately, that citizens can engage more effectively in democracy across Europe. 

Our aim is to publish findings in a public-facing report in June 2026.

Get involved

As part of this research, we’re conducting interviews with civic tech practitioners (especially in the civic participation space) as well as deliberative democracy practitioners between mid-March and the end of April 2026. 

If you’re a civic tech or deliberative democracy practitioner and would like to share your perspective on the proposed EU Civic Tech Hub, then please get in touch by filling out this form, or emailing tictec@mysociety.org.  

Last Thursday, a diverse set of people with a common interest came together at Birkbeck College in London for FOI Fest — a one day conference examining the successes, challenges and future of the Freedom of Information Act. We heard from a wide range of perspectives: those who use FOI, those who process requests, those who research the workings and effects of the Act, and those who oversee its application.

We couldn’t have wished for a better day: there was so much to discuss, with relevant and timely presentations, and real engagement in the room. As this was a kick-off event for the incipient FOI Network, the enthusiasm was gratifying; and there seems to be consensus that this should be considered the inaugural FOI Fest, rather than a standalone event.

We heard from both FOI regulators, listened to expert discussion, learned from an excellent set of skills sessions where experts shared insights on how to use FOI well; and enjoyed a set of short lightning talks where users explained how they had brought change through FOI. We’ve added links to each video presentation so you can watch any that are of interest.

Gavin Freeguard, longtime mySociety associate and FOI expert, was our host and co-organiser, kicking off proceedings by pointing out that the introduction of the FOI Act represented a “fundamental and vital change in the relationship between the public and government”. Our rights under FOI have survived two decades, and in the process an ecosystem of activists, researchers, campaigners, journalists and commissioners has arisen.

Information Commissioner John Edwards couldn’t be with us in person, but did send a video address, talking frankly about how the body is equally as stretched as they know many authorities are too — partly thanks to the increased use of AI. This was a theme that would recur through the day, from different authorities, although, as John was keen to point out, more FOI requests means more people accessing their right to information, and that, in itself, is a real positive.

Warren Seddon, Director of FOI and Transparency at the Information Commissioner’s Office, provided our first keynote, picking up on the theme of the increase in requests needing their oversight (they’re on track to receive more than 10,000 FOI complaints this year alone). AI-generated requests tend to be longer, contain inaccuracies and are less easy to understand. However, there was good news too: the ICO are exploring setting up an external monitoring system for public authorities outside of central government; Warren told us to watch this space.

Warren Seddon

Next, investigative journalist Jenna Corderoy, CEO of the Campaign for FOI Maurice Frankel, and Transparency International’s Rose Whiffen joined Warren for a panel discussion to interrogate the question “What has 21 years of FOI changed?“. 

Maurice began with the observation that the ICO’s powers are not strongly enough applied, resulting in many authorities experiencing no penalties for bad faith or late responses, albeit he’s detected some improvement since John Edwards took post. 

Jenna pointed out that times have changed since the introduction of FOI, but the Act hasn’t kept up, as can be seen for example by the government’s use of WhatsApp for messages that can be deleted and therefore cannot be publicly released. There’s an attitude issue, too: many authorities still see FOI as burdensome or even malign, when really we should all be supportive of this essential mechanism for transparency, allowing the vital uncovering of corruption and wrongdoing. 

Rose asserted that FOI has shifted public expectations, and built momentum for better government transparency, “rebalancing the information asymmetry which is where corruption thrives” and “shifting the risk calculation around corruption”.

Warren added that the things politicians were afraid of when the Act was first introduced have, for the most part, not been realised; and that it’s a great thing that any one of us can find out information from our local school, hospital or council.

Andreas Pavlou, Eleanor Shaikh, Isaac Beevor and Alex Parsons

In the next session, we enjoyed three ‘lightning talks’ – five minute presentations. Eleanor Shaikh, whose work you can read about in more detail in our blog post, used her slot to explain how the Act had given her the tools to uncover fundamental aspects of the UK Post Office Horizon scandal, many of which made front page headlines. She stressed the importance of taking your time to avoid being labelled ‘vexatious’, spacing requests out.

Isaac Beevor, from our Scorecards partners Climate Emergency UK, explained their use of FOI requests to obtain standardised datasets around councils’ road expansion plans, EPC ratings in social housing, energy procurement and more, as detailed in this blog post. He included a shoutout for WhatDoTheyKnow Pro and its Projects functionality, which meant they could share the work across a team of volunteers.

In the Q&A, an audience member expressed how very inspiring these two examples were, showing how one person can use FOI to bring real change.

Finally, Andreas Pavlou, Lead at the Open Government Partnership Independent Reporting Mechanism, brought the good news of positive advances in Access to Information in countries such as the Netherlands and Brazil, banging the drum for one of our favourite watchwords, collaboration.

George Greenwood

Before breaking for lunch, we enjoyed three skills sessions.

George Greenwood, Investigations Reporter at the Times, shared ten tips from his long experience of using FOI, which you can see for yourself on our Bluesky thread.

Lucas Amin of Democracy For Sale shared his experience of using EIR (Environmental Information Regulation) to uncover big stories: he’s also shared these at one of our ATI Network online events, so you can rewatch that here if you’re interested. 

And Ben Worthy, senior lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, explained his research project which used FOI to dig more deeply into how FOI works, experimenting to see whether formal requests were more likely to get a response (they are).

David Hamilton

After lunch, we complemented the morning’s keynote with another, this time from David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner, who echoed his ICO counterpart’s observations about the rise in complaints — partly because of AI and partly because public recognition of FOI is “higher than it’s ever been” (partly due to the recent high profile inquiry into the First Minister). “If you see the rights, you’re happy to use the rights”, he said, noting that the Scottish Information Commissioner is on the front page of a newspaper on average every three days at the moment, and that transparency was going to be a massive issue in Scotland’s forthcoming May election.

David also ran through the FOI Reform Bill currently going through Scottish Parliament, noting the differences between this and the FOI Act (which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus UK-wide public authorities that are based in Scotland).

For our second panel of the day, asking “What next for FOI?“, David was joined by Director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland Carole Ewart, Ben Worthy, and mySociety’s Alex Parsons and Louise Crow.

David Hamilton, Louise Crow, Carole Ewart, Ben Worthy and Alex Parsons

Louise began by reminding us that not every user of WhatDoTheyKnow is making a Freedom of Information request: in fact, each response is viewed on average 160 times, massively multiplying the benefit of the information contained within it. The publication of responses also means that authorities don’t have to deal with the same requests multiple times, as the information is free for all to see. She then highlighted the importance of FOI adapting to the current rise of AI systems, and the necessity of record-keeping so that transparency about how they work is not allowed to become opaque.

Ben shared his research on the use of AI in requests, observing that in the last year the number of authorities indicating that they are receiving requests composed by AI has risen from 30 to 70%. 

Carole was frank about the blocks to reform, saying that the attitudes towards FOI needed to change so that it was no longer seen as adversarial or aggressive — but she welcomed the changes on the horizon for Scotland.

Then, in our second skills session, Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for FOI shared tips for success with FOI requests, not least around keeping them within cost limits; and Martin Rosenbaum, author of Freedom of Information: A Practical Guidebook and for many years BBC News’ FOI expert, explained the importance both of persistence and of wording your requests carefully. Finally, mySociety’s own Julia Cushion and Gareth Rees explained what we’ve been doing on WhatDoTheyKnow and Alaveteli recently, from our beginners’ guide to FOI, to this page showcasing what FOI has done around the world. 

There was just time for three more lightning talks: reshowing this video from Gabriel Geiger, Investigative Reporter at Lighthouse Reports, on their award-winning Suspicion Machines investigation that showed how machine learning algorithms were disproportionately targeting individuals based on ethnicity and gender; followed by talks from Alex Homer, Senior Journalist at the BBC Shared Data Unit who shared a live investigation around the National Police Chiefs’ Council; and Carole Ewart, Director, Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland spoke about their work aiding NGOs in the use of FOI.

Finally Louise Crow wrapped up the day, and before we knew it, it was time to repair to the pub to carry on conversations in a more informal setting. An all-round success – and, we hope, the start of a very useful new network that we’ll be progressing over the next few weeks. Please fill in this form if you have an interest in being part of it.

Thanks to all our speakers, and to everyone who came and helped make the day a success. We’re also grateful to JRRT for supporting this exploration of the network, and eCase for additional sponsorship. Special thanks to Ben Worthy and Birkbeck for providing the excellent venue for the conference, and to Gavin Freeguard for compering the day, and all his work bringing the network together.

Gareth Rees, Julia Cushion, Martin Rosenbaum, Maurice Frankel and Gavin Freeguard

While the mapping services we’re most well known for are FixMyStreet, MapIt, and the Local Intelligence Hub, we do occasionally get the opportunity to collaborate with other organisations that share our ethos and could benefit from our expertise building flexible, easy-to-use data maps, for their internal teams or external supporters to use. One such example is a project we’ve just wrapped up with the Social Investment Business (SIB).

SIB is one of the UK’s largest social investors, coordinating over £800m in loans and grants to over 6,000 charities and social enterprises since 2002. Two of their core priorities are strengthening community assets and unlocking energy resilience, which got them thinking: what if some of the organisations they’ve previously funded could participate in energy flexibility schemes, to not only contribute to a greener electricity grid, but make a financial return that could be reinvested into their communities?

mySociety has previously explored energy flexibility. But for those unfamiliar with it, the concept is simple: the companies that operate the UK’s electricity network offer to pay organisations if they’re able to “flex” their electricity use (using less—or sometimes more—electricity) over certain periods of time. Any organisation is free to bid for these “flex tenders”, but typically they’d need to have large energy-consuming assets like industrial refrigerators, data centres, or heated swimming pools, which they could turn on or off, to really provide the “flex capacity” the network operators require.

The thing is, with more community organisations adopting new technologies like solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and battery storage, the barrier for participation in these flex tenders has dropped. Now your local community centre, or church, or school might be able to take part. We’ve even seen community organisations act as aggregators, utilising not just the flexibility of their own electrical assets, but also those of nearby householders who are willing to take part.

SIB has a built-in network of such community organisations. But the challenge is finding the sweet spots – the right organisations with the right equipment to offer the required flex capacity in a given tender area. And that’s where mySociety’s developers came in.

Over the course of a few weeks we built a tool that helps SIB identify organisations in their network who might have flex capacity, and who are based in one of the thousands of flex tender areas coming up in the UK over the next few years. Our tool also allowed SIB’s analysts to overlay data on energy poverty and deprivation, on nearby data centres, and nearby Warm Welcome spaces.

As with any data-heavy project like this, most of the difficult work was in finding and collating all of the data to populate the map. There is no one source of all flex tenders in the UK, so we had to collect listings from the six Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) individually. Some of these DNOs provided clean, structured data on the estimated geographical boundaries of each tender, while others provided only lists of postcodes, for which we then had to estimate rough boundaries, using the open data work of our much-loved former colleague Mark Longair. Add to this the complexity of each tender potentially having subtly different boundaries, or conversely, sharing identical boundaries, and we started to see why nobody had done this before.

But once the data was collected, and then mapped with some of the tips we’d learned through building the Local Intelligence Hub, SIB’s analysts were able to see exactly where their network overlaps with flex tender areas, and even identify the specific community organisations they could contact to explore the potential for participating in flex tenders.

More generally, the map also provides SIB with a persuasive policy tool – demonstrating the untapped potential for the UK’s third sector to support the country’s transition to a modern energy network, and the benefit that could be unlocked if this grassroots movement were to be supported by forward-thinking funding and regulation from central government.

Thomas Crabtree, Energy Analyst at SIB, said: “It’s been great to work with mySociety on this mapping project. Energy flexibility will play a big role in bringing cheaper, greener energy to the UK, and we want the community sector to lead this transition. This map represents an important first step in this work.”

We’re looking forward to seeing how our tool can contribute to the democratisation of the UK’s electricity network. In the meantime, if you have any similar projects you’d like to explore with us, just get in touch!

Photo: Kristian Buus / 10 10, CC BY 2.0, via Climate Visuals

In July 2024, we published our AI Framework, a first attempt at setting guidelines on how we utilise AI in our work at mySociety. The basic principles running through that framework can be summed up as “Use AI responsibly, and only when, all things considered, it is the best tool for the job”.

That position will serve us, and any organisation, for life — but, with such a fast-moving field and such speedy integration across so many of our areas of work, the consideration of  ‘all things’ must happen at regular intervals. It’s important that we keep checking in, to ensure that the framework is still providing timely and relevant guidance that reflects the current circumstances.

With this in mind, we’ve implemented a three-pronged approach:

• The AI Framework itself: this basic set of principles and questions is designed to act as a resource that staff members can keep referring back to if in doubt — and is a living document which we regularly update to reflect these fast-moving times.
• Our AI register: an internal spreadsheet, where staff are required to note new uses of AI, so that we have an up to date picture of how it is being deployed in areas across the organisation. This has already collected diverse use cases, from generating the transcripts of our podcasts with third party AI-based tools, to our own experiments with LLMs, like detecting inappropriate use of WhatDoTheyKnow. Where we think there are learnings for others to benefit from, we’ve written up these use cases here on our blog.
• A regular ‘Generative AI and Machine Learning’ meeting: this gives us the opportunity to discuss entries on the register, ask questions and consider any issues that have arisen.

So, with all this analysis going on, what are the changes we’ve seen since the first iteration of the framework? As you might imagine, they’re far-reaching, both in our own practices and in the wider world.

In our development: There’s been increasing experimentation and use of coding agent tools from our developers, always with an eye to whether these are producing valid outputs that genuinely save time, or solve problems that other tools couldn’t.

Some of the datasets we create now rely on LLM processes, where flexibility in interpreting and transforming language helps us create and combine data in ways not possible through other methods. These include the collection of data on APPGs; and our WriteToThem Insights work. 

We’ve experimented with some AI-based problem-solving on our websites and infrastructure: for example, screening for personal immigration requests that have mistakenly been submitted on WhatDoTheyKnow (a longstanding issue); and we are in the early stages of exploring machine learning approaches to help us understand potential ways of handling any abusive messages sent through WriteToThem. 

As for the external landscape: increasingly, we’re seeing funding opportunities that centre around the responsible deployment of AI for the good of democracy or transparency; and in our international community, via our Communities of Practice and TICTeC, we’re hearing of both more and more innovative application of AI to civic tech tools; and ways of monitoring its use by the state.

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Image: Steve Johnson

Submitting evidence to Parliamentary inquiries is one of the ways in which we can have an effect on the way things work in this country.

As you may recall, we recently contributed to the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee on Freedom of Information reform, and now we’ve submitted written evidence to the UK Procedure Committee’s inquiry on Written Questions.

This time, we’re making the case for more alignment between FOI requests and Parliament’s Written Questions system. Written Questions are a mechanism by which MPs and Lords can hold Ministers to account, in much the same way that the public can request information from government authorities through FOI.

We have recommended that a rejected parliamentary question should be retrospectively converted to an FOI request to allow making an appeal; and that given the influence of FOI in Parliament (both by parliamentarians, and in how they use FOI requests made by others), government statistics on FOI effectiveness should be scrutinised alongside Written Question statistics.

Finally, reflecting one of the findings in our WhoFundsThem work, we think that when a Member submits a Written Question and declares an interest, they should be required to say what that interest is.

For much more detail on each of these points, you can see our submission on the Parliament website.