Today we’ve published a new report with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, exploring how a future European civic tech hub could strengthen democratic participation across Europe.

You can read it online, or download as a PDF. 

Drawing on interviews with 19 civic tech organisations from 12 countries, we’ve wrestled with the opportunities and challenges facing participation and pro-democracy tech across Europe.

We’ve structured the report around three progress areas: increasing demand, strengthening supply, and optimising implementation. For each area, we identify both short term activities and longer term ambitions.

Recommendations

Jump to the recommendations section of the report

1. Increased demand

A recurring theme from our interviews was that the technical issues were only half of the problem. Many public authorities still need support to see participation itself as a valuable tool for better decision-making.

As a result, the report recommends that the hub should initially focus on practical support: helping people find existing resources, connecting them with networks, and showcasing successful examples. Over time, this can contribute to a broader shift where participation is increasingly seen as a normal and valuable part of governance.

2. Strengthened supply

A lot of our interviewees discussed the challenges they face as organisations building participation technology.

We heard that key barriers include procurement requirements, certification costs, and uncertainty around sustainable business models. The tensions between open vs closed source tech in the current market came up regularly, but we’ve tried to take a balanced approach.

Rather than treating open and closed source approaches as a binary choice, we think the hub can support a diverse ecosystem while reducing barriers to openness, collaboration and interoperability.

3. Optimised implementation

Here we’re trying to unite supply and demand.

We think there needs to be stronger links between civic tech practitioners, democratic innovators, universities and public authorities, alongside support for pilots in places where participation is less established. Longer term, we’d like the hub to explore approaches such as shared testing environments and procurement reform that would make participation technology easier to adopt and scale.

4.  Cross cutting themes

Finally, there are two cross-cutting themes that we wanted to recognise, even though they’re not central to our recommendations. 

The first is the importance of political buy-in. Successful participation processes require political leaders who are willing to engage with the outcomes, whatever they may be. The second is the growing impact of AI. Interviewees highlighted both the opportunities AI creates for participation technology and the new challenges it poses around regulation, platform governance and digital infrastructure. 

In summary

Overall, our conclusion is that the most valuable role for a European civic tech hub is to reduce friction across the ecosystem: helping authorities find trusted resources, supporting organisations to navigate barriers, sharing evidence of what works, and creating the conditions for participation to become a more routine part of democratic decision-making.

Read the full report, and watch our launch event.

Any questions, comments or feedback? Get in touch tictec@mysociety.org

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Photo by and machines on Unsplash

Whether or not you voted, or no matter who you voted for, every person in Wales is now represented by six MSs in the Senedd. 

And the good news is, we’re here to help you navigate the new system!

✉️ You can find out who your six MSs are, and contact all or some of them, through WriteToThem.

🔔 Want to follow what they’re up to? The new MSs have been loaded into TheyWorkForYou, so you can also set up alerts to receive an email any time they speak, or whenever a topic you care about is mentioned in the Senedd. 

📊 If you use constituency data based on postcodes in your work, you can easily convert it using our new tool — more about this below. 

✉️  Find and write to your representatives in seconds

Just enter your postcode in WriteToThem and we’ll show you:

• your six MSs
• your MP
• your local councillors

From there, you can send a message directly through the site. 

PS: We’ve been funded by the Welsh Government to make improvements to WriteToThem: more news on that soon!

📊 A brand new postcode converter tool

With new constituencies having been created across Scotland and Wales, organisations will find that any postcode data they used to depend on to map their supporters to representatives is now out of date. Happily, we can help. 

Enter your postcode into our online tool and it’ll give you a simple copy-and-pastable output you can plug right into your spreadsheet. 

🔔 Democracy doesn’t stop on election night

Elections matter, but democracy is also what happens in between them. TheyWorkForYou covers the Senedd in English and Welsh, so you can keep track of what is happening locally on the issues you care about.

We’ll send you alerts directly to your inbox, and we’ve upgraded the customisation functions recently! Need some more help? Here’s our guidance page.

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

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

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

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

Volume/complexity of requests

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

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

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

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

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

Locating information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working with requesters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Illustration: Alghozy

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

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

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

Themes and conclusions

Passive pushback

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

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

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

Active pushback

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

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

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

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

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

Writing/managing good requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding/using appeal processes

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

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

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

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

Takeaways

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

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

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

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Image: GuerillaBuzz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LLMs can increase demand on public systems by removing the friction that previously limited access. One potential result of this is new forms of unconsidered rationing that recreate that friction. Instead, we should move away from zero sum systems and aim for technical and policy approaches that turn unscalable private benefits into efficient collective ones. 

Many kinds of citizen-driven interactions with the public sector are rationed through friction: fewer people engage in them than might do otherwise, because they feel the process is time-consuming or requires expertise. We can see examples of this in planning objections, correspondence with elected representatives, FOI requests and consultation responses. LLM technologies can lower the time or expertise required and also prompt people to engage in the processes in the first place: “Would you like me to draft a complaint about this?”

Systematic impacts

This reduced friction may be good for individuals, but the resulting increase in engagement can overwhelm the system itself. In response, it may slow down, collapse, or adopt new means of rationing or prioritising access. We can see indications of this across different kinds of interactions: journalist Martin Rosenbaum has identified an upward trend across public sector complaints organisations, and concerns are being raised across sectors about AI’s contribution to growth in volumes. 

So how should organisations that handle public submissions respond in an informed way? Here’s an approach to thinking about the problem. We can divide these interactions into three types:

• Private benefit – when an interaction has a benefit almost exclusively to the requester, either competitively (eg a grant or job application), or non-competitively (eg an application for a state benefit).
• Collective benefit – when an interaction has a benefit to the requester, and also to wider society (eg a public FOI request, reporting a pothole). 
• Zero sum interaction – when an interaction success for one person is a failure for another (eg planning). 

Private benefits

Some public services fall clearly in the first category: they are unavoidably a collection of private interactions. For these, there might be improved efficiencies to be found in delivery at scale but, particularly for non-competitive benefits, these are also likely to eventually run into decisions either about increasing provision (assuming a higher level of claims from those entitled going forward), or new forms of rationing.

As stands, AI inputs can both improve the efficiency of systems through sharper, more complete initial submissions, but can also make more verbose and complex submissions that cite non-existent law. To prioritise the former over the latter, systems can explore triage approaches that enforce or encourage the qualities that make input valuable: clarity, accuracy and concision. 

When running into real limits, it is important to be clear about the criteria you want to ration on, and that they are in line with the overall purpose of the system, rather than implicitly prioritising those with greater resources.  In their FOI complaints system, the ICO is using public benefit as a criteria for prioritisation. The British Academy uses partial randomisation above a scoring cutoff to ration randomly rather than requiring additional work (on both sides) to further differentiate.

Collective benefits

A bigger win is, where possible, to transform private benefits into collective benefits.  In these cases, reduced friction is self-regulating because spillover benefits from an individual’s case help reduce demand from others : the private benefit person B is looking for has already been provided by person A’s interaction. 

One of the key ways mySociety’s services help people is to harness the self-interest of individual users for collective benefits. Every public request made on WhatDoTheyKnow also adds to the pool of public knowledge accessible on the internet, reducing the need for duplicate requests (with a similar logic to reducing duplicate reports on FixMyStreet). This means we can effectively lower the bar to access while improving overall efficiency of the system. 

We come to this from a technology lens, but the same principles apply from an institutional-design approach. For instance, if MPs’ casework or complaints are  increasing, you want to shift towards more systematic rather than individual benefits from casework. This looks like support for better collective learning, and an improved ombudsman to support collective rather than individual fixes. This kind of approach works best where good statistics are collected at a system level to help identify what collective changes are needed: tracking the overall level of demand, level of demand to different parts of the system and nature of the demand, ie what are people asking for.

Zero sum systems

The biggest shift needed is in reforming zero-sum systems, where there is currently an incentive for both sides to escalate the volume. Reduced friction here just raises costs for all concerned rather than giving increased benefits to anyone. Individual use of AI to create submissions is individually enabling in these cases, but not collectively. So, in the words of the 1980s classic film War Games, “the only winning move is not to play”. The real innovation is in solutions that open up new, and more effective, ways of working out what everyone can live with, rather than recreating rationing through new means. For instance, rather than adversarial AI planning objection generators, we could aim for a collaborative planning system that through improved communication and coordination lowers costs and removes incentives to volumes of engagement. 

Red flags for zero sum interactions are when volume is implicitly being used as a proxy for strength of feeling, or popularity of a particular viewpoint, because its value as a signal is going to become increasingly degraded as AI use increases.   

Systems work better when the benefits are collective rather than atomised

Mass adoption of AI removes one set of bottlenecks, but this can create capacity challenges for public systems. Previous waves of civic technology have built on reduced costs of storing and sharing information to build systems that help share the benefits of people’s work and lower the barriers to entry.

The current wave of AI chatbots cut against this, encouraging atomised approaches, rather than collective ones. We need to explore technical and policy approaches that help systems better achieve their purpose, without giving up on the idea of lowering barriers to entry. We can do this both by exploring how the technological features of AI tools can be bent towards collective gains, and moving away from systems that incentivise these approaches. 

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Image: Engin Akyurt

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