In a speech introducing his political agenda, the (in-all-likelihood) future Prime Minister Andy Burnham discussed changes to the whipping system in Westminster, with promises of “letting MPs be authentic representatives and not using the whip system to create fear or close down debate”.

This is a theme he covered at more length in his book (co-authored with Steve Rotheram) Head North. Their argument is that the whipping system fits into the wider problem of centralisation in British politics, where tight central control over how MPs vote moves power towards an even smaller number of people, who make worse decisions because the wider expertise of the party’s MPs are excluded from the process. Moving power away from MPs throws away the knowledge of place that those MPs represent. 

Here are three practical reforms to parliamentary whipping that address this complaint:

• Define the whip – give a clear scope and bounds to acceptable and unacceptable approaches
• Co-produce the whip – involve the parliamentary party in shaping the party line
• Publish the whip – produce clear public justification for voting instructions

These are reforms that can be implemented by any party without changes to parliamentary processes, but would be improved by changes to parliamentary processes to entrench and support them. 

What is the whip?

In the House of Commons, most votes are “whipped”, meaning MPs are expected to vote in accordance with the instructions the party has given.

There are different schools of thought on what the balance should be between parties and MPs. MPs are elected as individuals, but usually as part of a party with manifesto promises. As such, party discipline is not inherently illegitimate: there is a democratic argument that parties act as an intermediary that can keep their MPs aligned with the public mandate they got in the election. 

In this argument, MPs acting as completely free agents is bad for public accountability. Unlike parties, voters have no mechanisms between elections to keep MPs aligned with election promises, and very poor ones at elections, which work better as an informed choice between party agendas rather than 650 separate elections. 

That said, there is a big gap between this justification for the whip and how it works in practice. Burnham’s complaint is that in practice the whip is not forcing unruly MPs in line with their constituents: it’s doing the opposite. Party discipline goes far beyond just issues that were part of the manifesto and centralises decision making power in ways that make how MPs vote more distant from their constituencies:

“The minute [MPs] walk through the door to take their seats, the power given to them by the public is removed and effectively handed to a small number of their elected colleagues and many more unelected advisers who set the party lines and positions for which they are required to vote. 

“As a result, the whip system disempowers MPs, diminishes their status and, over time, disconnects them from their constituents. It makes you say things you’re not sure about and vote for things you don’t believe in. At its worst, the whip system unfairly makes good people seem like frauds.” 

There is room for these different perspectives on the whip to be reconciled through approaches that remain disciplined and cohesive, but that are also more transparent and emerge from more collaborative approaches to politics. 

Define the whip

A simple first step would be to write down what the expected “bounds” of party management are. 

This would be a statement that itemises political consequences the whip may impose (e.g. an ongoing pattern making it less likely that an MP will be chosen for government roles), versus approaches to party discipline on voting that would not be acceptable (such as denying absence slips, suspension from the party, losing funding for constituency projects, or intimidation). 

This could also set the scope for when the party has the clearest legitimate interest in whipping (votes related to manifesto issues), and confirm rules that there are certain votes (conscience votes, votes on house matters) where either the party might not take a position, or where there are no sanctions attached to not following that position. 

This should be an easy win, and is mostly restating what should already be good practice, or returning to an earlier set of norms. As Philip Cowley notes there’s been a substantial increase in MPs being suspended from the party for voting against the whip, with none in ten years of the Blair government compared to eleven in the first year of the Starmer government. A statement returning to that Blair-era norm would be a substantial reset in relations between the leadership and the parliamentary party. 

Writing the rules down is also part of making Parliament more normal. The “Whips” are a combination of what could boringly be called “party managers”, and a more secretive role, where the ambiguity allows them to contribute to the worst aspects of Parliamentary culture. The threats, bullying and blackmail are always said to be a thing of the past, but where “the past” becomes ever more recent as new stories surface. Greater transparency helps shift this balance, establishing party managers as a legitimate part of the Parliamentary system, whose actions are aligned with an effective and professional working culture. 

This step would, however, not be enough to address Burnham’s objections to the outcomes of the whipping system. To engage with the substance of the complaint means changing not just how whips behave, but how the decisions on the party line are made. 

Co-produce the whip

The substance of Burnham’s complaint is not just that he was told what to do, but he was told to do the wrong thing because the parliamentary party was not involved in setting the policy. 

As he put it, “the government I served in would have helped itself if it had trusted the majority feeling in the [Parliamentary Labour Party] rather than continue to force on it the preferred position of a small number of people at the heart of government.” What we need are approaches that mean the parliamentary party is more involved in setting the line it is then expected to follow. Here we can look to the German Parliament for useful approaches. 

The “free mandate” of German MPs to vote in accordance with their conscience is constitutionally protected. However, in practice, this ends up in a very similar place to the UK Parliament, where MPs almost always vote along party lines. The big difference between these systems is that in Germany the “party line” is not purely dictated by the leadership, but emerges from processes involving party MPs. 

In the German system, MPs in each party form working groups that shadow parliamentary committees. These are substantial policy-making bodies for the party, provided with parliamentary resources and researchers to support their work. 

If we shifted towards a similar system, MPs would develop deeper policy expertise and be more directly involved in shaping the party position on that area or piece of legislation, while MPs not part of that area defer to the process and wisdom of their more engaged colleagues. This reflects the party discipline that is important to clear lines of accountability to voters, while addressing the complaint that centralisation of decision-making throws away the intelligence and moral sense of MPs. 

Aspects of this happen already, and a step a new government could take is to take more formal notice of working groups, encouraging them to form through expectations that the whips office and ministers will engage with them. In time, more parliamentary resources could be made available to parties to support these groups. Another intermediate approach would be to allow the parliamentary party to select its membership on public bill committees, which in theory review legislation but in practice the whips select against members with specialisms in the area to maintain central control of the process. 

MPs are responsible for how they vote, but are judged collectively. The goal for MPs should be higher than the right to say “I didn’t agree with that decision”. This might be satisfying personally, but doesn’t help the people affected by bad decisions (and is unlikely to be electorally rewarded). The goal is to advocate and demand processes that lead to good collective decisions. 

Whether that’s the German model, an evolution of bill committees or something entirely new, the question is not just how we move away from centralising structures, but what new ones we need in their place that act as a counter pressure to government departments in the legislative process. 

Publish the whip

If parties are going to instruct MPs how to vote, they should tell us they’re doing that. Obviously we know in the abstract that most votes are whipped, but in the public record only the votes of individuals are visible.

It’s not that knowing the party instructions would excuse a bad result (MPs are ultimately responsible for how they vote), but it would play an important public education role in both how Parliament works and the quality of the decision making process. 

One of the long running effects of TheyWorkForYou has been to encourage MPs to make more public justifications of how they vote. Publishing the whip would be an extension of that, encouraging parties to make full descriptions of their reasons for votes. This would be a good incentive to move towards a more co-produced process, where the work of producing recommendations has public as well as internal outputs. 

We think greater transparency is the friend of better processes — helping draw power away from centralised and secretive processes towards those that need to explain and justify themselves in public. It’s also popular: 62% of the public agreed that parties should be public with how they instruct their MPs to vote. Committing to publish the whipping information would represent a public commitment to a new way of working, that helps encourage and entrench better practice. 

Building what comes next

Party discipline is a key feature of modern parliamentary democracy, but the specifics of “the whip” in the House of Commons are not. It has changed over time, and can be changed again.  Other places do things differently, and we can look there for ideas about how things can change.

The challenge for Burnham (and for Labour MPs who want to seize the opportunity) is to go beyond just minimising the drawbacks of the current system. What’s needed is to define the new institutions and processes that deliver the goals of a collaborative approach to politics, making the most out of the judgement and skills of MPs, to raise the standard of how decisions are made in Parliament. 

 

Header image: House of Commons Division Lobby | @House of Commons | House of Commons | Flickr 

Representatives in the UK’s Parliaments and Assemblies do many things, but one of the most important is that they make decisions. These decisions shape the laws that govern us, and can affect every aspect of how we live our lives. 

On TheyWorkForYou, we list and display the individual votes of representatives, and for the UK House of Commons, we also create voting summaries that group a set of decisions together into a policy, like ‘preventing climate change’ or ‘increasing stamp duty’ — so for any specific MP you can see how they have generally voted around that issue.

As of this update, the summaries now contain all relevant votes up to  the end of April 2026. This blog post logs changes we’ve made to what’s included, and our ongoing thinking about how new votes suggest broader changes to our approach. 

We’re always working to improve our coverage and how we display and share our information. If you think this work is valuable, and want to help us bring greater transparency, please make a donation to support our work. 

About our summaries

Our summaries group a set of votes into a ‘policy’ (like ‘removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords’) where votes either agree or are against that policy . We label votes as either “scoring” or “informative”: only the scoring votes contribute to the headline of whether an MP is for or against a policy. We also compare an MP to a cohort of similar MPs (MPs of the same party who voted on the same votes) to give an indication when MPs’ voting notably differs from their party. 

We also sometimes include ‘agreements’ (where a decision was made without a vote) as part of policies — but do so conservatively to balance the difficulty of interpreting these decisions with the blind spots their complete exclusion would lead to.  

In drafting new policies and including votes, our main criteria for inclusion are:

• Substance – votes using the powers of Parliament
• Cohesion – we include votes that are mostly, if not completely, about the specific policy
• Uniqueness  – votes that have limited overlap with scoring votes in different policies
• Noteworthiness – where this might reflect impact of the legislation, news coverage, or public interest

The goal of these principles is to create policies where the top level summary is a good guide to the votes it summarises. When votes fulfil some but not all of these criteria, we may include them as informative votes.

You can read more about our approach.

New live policies

This update introduces the following policies:

• Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill — [Person name] voted for/against scrapping the two-child limit so that families on Universal Credit get extra support for every child, not just their first two.
• Railways Bill – [Person name] voted for/against bringing the railways into public ownership by creating Great British Railways, a single body running most train services and the track in England.
• Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy 2025  — [Person name] voted for/against scrapping the scheme that let people avoid prosecution for Troubles-related crimes in exchange for cooperating, and removing the ban on bringing Troubles-related claims in the civil courts. 
• Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy 2023  — [Person name] voted for/against setting up an independent body to investigate Troubles-related deaths and injuries, ending most other criminal investigations and inquests, and offering people immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperating.
• NIC Changes – National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Bill — [Person name] voted for/against taxing salary-sacrifice pension contributions above £2,000 a year (from April 2029).
• English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill – [Person name] voted for/against standardizing and increasing powers of devolved mayoralties, replacing two-tier local authorities with larger unitary authorities, and introducing a community right to buy.
• Sentencing Bill – [Person name] voted for/against making judges normally suspend prison sentences of a year or less, expanding suspended sentences and tagging, reducing independence of Sentencing Council from government. 

Votes added to existing policies

• A vote on government regulations around Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading was added to the ‘measures to prevent climate change’ policy line. 
• Two votes on government regulations around reception conditions and provision of accommodation to Asylum Seekers were added to the ‘stricter asylum system’ policy line. 

Notes

Fiscal drag

TheyWorkForYou has a number of ‘policies’ on changes to tax rates. Over the last few revisions, we have been conforming these where a vote ‘for’ a policy is a vote for a higher rate of tax. 

Where this immediately runs into trouble is the distinction between ‘more tax’ and ‘higher tax rate’, where a period of inflation has made this sharper than would have previously been the case. 

This update shows the problem in two changes. The rate of alcohol duty was increased inline with RPI (uprating): an increase in cash terms, but not in ‘real’ terms. Separately, basic rate and personal allowance has been frozen, which is fiscal drag. As the House of Commons explainer puts it “[n]ot increasing the value of tax thresholds (‘freezing’ them) increases people’s taxable income without tax rates actually increasing”. 

So, with a “change in tax rate” lens (how we currently evaluate this), income tax has stayed the same, while alcohol duty has been increased. But in terms of inflation adjusted tax (roughly) the opposite is true. 

An alternate framing would be to shift to a “tax impact” approach, where a vote is evaluated on whether it increases/decreases tax relative to an uprated baseline (where that baseline would typically be which of the varying possible indexes was defined in law). 

This is slightly more complicated, but is usually clear from the commentary where it matters most. The main problem is consistency retrospectively (although low inflation for the majority of the period covered generally makes this a bit of a wash).

The main impact of this is that as well as reversing the direction of our income tax threshold policy, we are changing some of the language used. 

Moving from:

[Person name] voted for/against raising the threshold at which people start to pay income tax

To:

[Person name] voted for/against increasing income tax (in real terms)

For the alcohol duty vote, we have added this to the existing policy line as a ‘neutral’ vote, which means we have cataloged it as relevant, but it doesn’t contribute to for/against scoring. 

Diago Garcia and votes that go nowhere

We have tagged the votes on legislation around ceding the Chagos islands to Mauritius  for the moment. While our usual policy would be to include votes after the third reading (which has happened), this decision has now effectively been put on pause in terms of the final steps of the legislation.

With the voting summaries, we have a focus on votes that have impact — but substantive votes that end up going nowhere can happen.

Ten minute rule bills (which can pass our criteria on being a substantive vote, but then get no extra time so have no prospect of becoming law) also merit a different approach. Here, we’ll include them if we have an existing policy line, but do not create new policy lines for them.

This means we do not create inaccuracies in existing content (if we say there is a list of votes on a policy, we will include the new vote on that policy), but also do not create new policies for a specific bill when that bill is unlikely to become live legislation. 

This is in line with our approach on legislation that is moving through Parliament while also a matter of substantial public discussion, like the recent Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Here we added the votes to an existing policy around assisted dying as they were happening (because otherwise we would say an MP had not voted in an assisted dying vote), but in the end the legislation stalled in the Lords.

NI troubles legacy

The 2025/2026 bill votes reverses (or affirms the striking down by the courts of) elements of the 2023 Legacy Act.

As such, votes on the original legislation are read as being against the new policy that describes this bill. However, the original act had more elements, and so we’ve retrospectively created a policy line for the 2023 legislation. Generally these pieces of legislation have been coherent on party lines, so this should work cleanly for MPs present for both sets of votes. 

Lord Mandelson

Despite it being a hugely significant Parliamentary action, we have not created a new policy for the humble address (a parliamentary process to compel the release of government documents) on the release of Lord Mandelson documents and communications. 

This was passed by agreement (without a vote), and because of the difficulty of interpreting these, we include them conservatively where they fit into an existing policy.

We do have a currently unpublished policy that includes votes around openness and transparency which we have logged this in: this is waiting on sharpening up the description and/or splitting into smaller policy groups. 

Separating out older policies

We now display policies in voting summaries in five year groups – pushing policies that were last voted on longer ago further down each section. 

Here we are trying to balance a few different considerations:

• Long standing MPs have voted on a lot of things – some of these are now probably not what people are looking for when looking at the voting records – we want to have some recency bias. 
• Some of those long ago votes are still hugely significant – laws on the books continue to affect people’s lives even if the vote was a long time ago. 

Splitting policies into five year buckets based on when the last vote was will help keep votes that keep coming up in different forms present. At the same time, more historical policies are separated out, while still being in the list.

Uncontentious legislation

One of the signifiers of ‘noteworthiness’ we’re using is second/third stage votes on primary legislation (something that will become a law). 

This in general fits in with a shift towards describing these votes under policies that cover a specific bill (with a clear but simple description of what that bill covers) rather than covering the same vote under several different policies (which create a false impression that voting decisions are being made independently in different policies, when in practice it’s the same vote). 

Where we have been creating policy lines is where all major stage votes have been passed by agreement. In this update, for this reason we are not covering the ‘Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill’,  ‘Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill’ and ‘Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill’.

This reflects that these are uncontentious legislation that are typically smaller in scope  — although it also raises the complaint that we’re not reflecting progress on areas of cross-party agreement. 

This is coherent with our general approach of not having ‘all agreement’ policies, but a switch to describing bills in policies means the voting records can double (if currently a bit uncleanly) as a record of legislation passed during a Parliament. 

One approach in future might be to better distinguish in the voting record display between ‘thematic’ and ‘legislative’ policies, which could in principle then include separately ‘uncontentious policies’ which are entirely agreements. For the moment we have marked these three as draft policies in case we want to revisit this in future. 

Motions to annul (and similar)

This is adjacent to votes, but as part of our signatures update to TheyWorkForYou we started to list Early Day Motions (formally a draft motion system that in practice works as a petition system) and open letters MPs have signed in their profiles. As part of this, we separated out ‘motions to annul’ from the wider set of EDMs, as these are motions that, if promoted to a debate and vote, would object to and annul government regulations passed through secondary legislation. 

We can pick these out because Parliament’s API marks them as different; however, they are not the only kind of substantive motion that can be proposed through the EDM process. 

The current EDM on the draft EHRC code of practice is substantively similar to a motion to annul, but is following a form set in the legislation rather than the general motion to annul process. As such, we have manually added this motion to this group and it is displayed in the more substantive section on the signature pages of MPs who support it.  We have created a tag to capture this sort of motion, and amended copy on MPs profiles to reflect a slightly broader scope on what we’re including under motions to annul. 

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If you appreciate our work to make TheyWorkForYou a clear, objective and up to date resource for checking MPs’ voting records, please consider making a donation.

Header image: Photo by Vimal S on Unsplash

This week I travelled to The Hague to take part in ATI Day 2026, organised by our friends SPOON and hosted by the Dutch Advisory Board on Public Access and Information Management (ACOI). We heard from a range of campaigners, journalists, lawyers and researchers working on access to information from across Europe and beyond, including colleagues from Poland, Hungary, India, France, Belgium, Canada, Scotland and the Netherlands.

The day was organised in advance of the Dutch government’s review of the Open Government Act (known as “Woo”). We were there to bring different answers to the question “What makes oversight of Freedom of Information laws effective?”. Our friends at SPOON, like many of us, are worried about the possibility of backsliding as part of the review process.

By bringing together practitioners from countries with very different systems directly into contact with the ACOI, we aimed to highlight practical lessons that could help strengthen the Dutch system. Rather than asking whether oversight bodies are needed (definitely yes!), the discussion focused on how they should be designed to make sure the right to information works in practice, not just theory.

Strong laws are only part of the picture

Although each country has a different legal system, the conversations throughout the day revealed remarkably similar challenges. Courts are often expensive and slow, ombudspeople are cheap or free but non-binding, information commissioners are effective but under-resourced. 

Marzena from Citizens Network Watchdog Poland explained that in Poland there is no dedicated information commissioner. Instead, requesters can only take cases to court. While this route is relatively inexpensive compared to legal routes in other countries, we heard that cases routinely take many months to resolve, and even a successful judgment does not necessarily mean the information is released. 

India has a network of information commissioners, but the transparency-averse government delays appointing commissioners in order to create significant backlogs and frustrate the system. In some states, commission offices sit empty while appeals continue to accumulate. Satark Nagrik Sangathan has published fantastic reports detailing this. 

At the European Union level, investigative journalist Alexander Fanta described another familiar dilemma: the European Ombudsman can investigate complaints and issue recommendations, but these are not binding. Going to court is possible, but often prohibitively slow and expensive. One recent transparency case from Client Earth reportedly cost around €20,000!

Our friends at FragDenStaat explained that there’s an imbalance in data-related legislation in Germany. Whilst there are significant statutory powers relating to data protection, the powers available to protect and uphold Freedom of Information are much weaker. One recent case relating to a rejected FOI request was successfully resolved using GDPR regulations rather than freedom of information law because those powers were stronger.

Beyond the law

In a quick 10 minute session, Toby Mendel of the Centre for Law and Democracy outlined six characteristics of effective oversight bodies. An oversight body, he argued, should be:

• independent from government
• specialised in access to information
• able to make binding decisions
• able to move beyond mediation to adjudication where necessary
• an accessible alternative to lengthy court proceedings
• responsible not only for appeals, but also for promoting the law through guidance, training and proactive publication.

Considering our own set up in the UK, I think the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a number of strengths: it is largely independent of government, can issue legally binding decisions, provides an accessible alternative to the courts, and invests heavily in guidance and support for both requesters and public authorities.

At the same time, the conversations in The Hague were a reminder that good institutional design is only part of the picture. An oversight body also needs the capacity to resolve complaints promptly and promote a culture of openness across the public sector. Like many regulators, the ICO operates under resource constraints, and delays in resolving complaints can undermine confidence in the system, even where the underlying legal framework is strong.

The ICO itself has recognised the challenges of maintaining timeliness while responding to an increasingly broad and complex regulatory workload. Looking across the different international models, the UK has much to value and recognise, but as we’ve written about in the past, we need to accept that effective oversight requires ongoing investment as well as good legislation.

Strengthening our systems

Perhaps the strongest theme of the day was that no single institutional model has solved the problem, and we all have work to do. Carole from the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland encouraged us not to settle – her work advancing the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill to strengthen their existing system was really inspiring.

It was encouraging to hear our hosts at ACOI reflected openly on areas where the Dutch system could be strengthened, including having greater investigative powers and binding decisions. I hope the day can serve as an example to decision makers in the Dutch government that strong ATI laws combined with effective oversight systems help support thriving democracies rather than diminish them. 

Stronger together

Ultimately, the day was a reminder of the value of international networks like the ATI Network. Bringing practitioners together creates space to learn from each other’s successes and setbacks, and hopefully collaborate together in future. Beyond the work of our own organisations, international attention matters to those in power. Knowing that colleagues across Europe and beyond are following developments, celebrating progress and raising concerns when transparency comes under pressure can strengthen domestic advocacy. By continuing to learn from one another, we stand a much better chance of making the right to information work not just on paper, but in practice.

If you want to help us to do more of this work, please consider donating.

Every two weeks there’s a new release of the House of Commons’ Register of Members Financial Interests. 

As part of the work that went into our Beyond Transparency report, we got together a team of volunteers to go right through the register and understand more about what was in it. From that we learned about patterns, and things we wanted to pay more attention to going forward. 

Every time the register comes out, we get it uploaded onto TheyWorkForYou; then we go through and make a BlueSky thread picking out interesting bits (where ‘interesting’ might just be noteworthy, or a new pattern, as well as “this is bad”). 

This is sharpening our thinking, helping us draw out trends over time, and think about how we can best use platforms and data to argue for changes to the rules, and higher standards in politics. 

I’m going to keep this blog post updated as an index of these threads, with a quick summary of the key things we’ve found. 

If you’d like to get them as they happen, follow @theyworkforyou.com on Bluesky. 

2026–06-30: thread

In this register, Nigel Farage’s gold, Rishi Sunak’s speeches, 23 freebies including Ascot, the Chelsea Flower Show, and an unnamed music concert.

2026-06-16: thread

This register featured payments from the social media platform X; the opening of the Labour leadership contest; and ministerial freebies — including a David Lammy football ticket declaration that shows how Parliament’s rules lag behind the civil service’s.

2026-06-03: thread

The gifts register is viewed through a ‘third parties handing MPs nice tickets’ lens, plus the recurring charity-offset convention.

2026-05-19: thread

The dominant theme is MPs accepting money from a source and donating it to charity, against a backdrop of widespread sporting freebies.

2026-04-29: thread

The last register of the parliamentary session, with continuing X payments, calls to ban them, and the developing charity-offset convention.

2026-04-14: thread

Gifts received in a private capacity versus those with a professional justification — and a trend toward MPs giving fuller justifications.

2026-03-24: thread

Several notable entries, focused on Farage’s earnings from the Cameo website; and whether freebies from third parties are worse than those from venues.

2026-03-10: thread

Who went to the BRIT Awards, plus an FOI request on civil service gift rules.

2026-02-24: thread

Foreign trips and freebies, including APPG travel and how the cumulative £300 threshold works.

2026-02-03: thread

A few notes on the new register, centring on a gambling company freebie and the problem of structuring the PM’s security as a gift.

2026-01-06: thread

New year, new register: payments from X; gifts from ‘not free’ countries; and big foreign-funded trips.

2025-12-16: thread

A short note on rare gifts from non-UK sources.

2025-12-02: thread

Small gifts tipping over the £300 disclosure threshold, and hospitality from ‘not free’ countries.

2025-11-18: thread

Sunak’s Hoover Institute payment, party donations, and freebie taxonomy.

2025-11-04: thread

Continuing Labour deputy-leader donations, an APPG foreign trip, and Ascot freebies.

2025-10-21: thread

Deputy-leader donations, a National Lottery operator’s Rugby World Cup freebie, and how APPGs open doors to gifts.

2025-09-17: thread

MPs’ outside legal work and the difficulty of naming clients, plus more freebies.

2025-08-05: thread

A register heavy on freebies, including Google/YouTube taking six MPs to Glastonbury; free tickets for the PM’s wife and a gambling tax lobbying push.

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Image: Guzz Alkala

Through Parliamentary written questions, MPs and Peers can ask for information and documents from government departments. But as part of that, they’re supposed to declare if they have any relevant financial interests that relate to the question they’re asking. This provides (incomplete) transparency on where the access they’re given in the public interest is also mixed with potential private benefits. 

We’ve recently raised a successful complaint about a set of questions tabled by Nick Timothy MP, who has apologised for the missing declaration.  This blog post covers what we learned from making that complaint, and the potential for expanding the scope of our work on highlighting missing interests. 

Exploring written questions

As part of research investigating parliamentary written questions, we discovered that a set of similar questions had been asked without an interest being declared, but where we thought there were relevant interests that should have been declared.

We want to explore how we can use our data to improve compliance with Parliament’s existing rules. One of our concerns is that Parliament periodically adopts stronger transparency rules, but in practice there is a lack of proactive enforcement. As we are in favour of stronger rules, understanding how to encourage better enforcement of existing rules is important for our goal of raising standards. 

There is an existing avenue to address this. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards takes complaints from members of the public, and will then decide whether to open an investigation. 

This is not something we’d done before at mySociety, and we reviewed previous complaints to have some idea of the expected form and outcomes. We’ve learned more about the threshold for a complaint to be accepted, and this is already informing how we approach our future work. 

Our complaints

We raised two complaints about MPs from different parties. One was rejected as we had not “adequately explained” the breach of the rules. The other, about Nick Timothy, was accepted. 

In our report about we raised issues with three sets of his parliamentary questions:

• A declaration about an oral question;
• Two questions we thought should have been associated to a donation he received from the racehorse auctioneers Tattersalls;
• Four questions we thought should be associated with a gift of honorary membership he received from  the Jockey Club. 

The Commissioner only accepted the last of these three:

“I will only be investigating Mr Timothy’s alleged failure to declare an interest when tabling his four written Questions of December 2025. I will not be investigating your allegation about his oral Question of 6 February 2025. This is because, by virtue of paragraph 7(a) of Chapter 2 of the Guide to the Rules, oral Questions do not need to be accompanied by a declaration. I also will not be investigating your allegation that a declaration was needed in respect of Mr Timothy’s written Questions of 10 June 2025. This is because I am not satisfied on the evidence available that the test of relevance was met.”

The first issue we raised was around Parliament’s rule about clear declarations of interests: Timothy had referenced his register of interest in an oral question, but not specified which interest he was referring to (which is the requirement of the current rules for debates). In this case, knowing which interest he meant would have been useful in judging if he was aware of the relevance of the same interest at other times. 

The rule the Commissioner referenced in response was that an interest does not need to be declared “[i]f to do so would unduly impede the business of the House; for example, during oral Questions, when asking supplementary Questions, or when responding to a Ministerial statement.” This reflects the general problem that declarations on questions are held to a lower standard in the rules than speeches (and oral questions to a lower standard than written questions)  —  but fair enough, that’s the rule.

The second set is interesting and tells us how directly connected an interest and a question needed to be. In this we connected a pair of questions about horseracing and then pending gambling reform to a donation from Tattersalls referenced in the register.

Tattersalls is not in itself a gambling company. Our view is that there is a cluster of related industries that make up the horseracing industry, all of whom depend directly or indirectly on the connection between horseracing and gambling. Indeed, in our complaint, we quoted the chairman of Tattersalls from their annual report, explicitly highlighting how gambling regulation affects them as part of the wider industry. 

However, this was judged not to pass the test of relevance, which from the Code of Conduct is “whether those interests might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions or words as a Member”.

From our perspective, looking at the questions and interests in aggregate, we see a set of donations from the horseracing industry, and in parallel a set of questions that relate to the big push by that industry around gambling reform at the time. This is not to say one happens because of the other, but that they’re a relevant fact to highlight. However, to engage the investigation, we need to draw a connection between a specific interest and a specific question. In this case, the commissioner judged there were too many hops.

For the third set, we had a more direct argument. This highlighted a set of questions that relate to racehorse training yards or racecourses,and highlighted that the Jockey Club (of which Timothy has an honorary membership) describes itself in its SIC code and accounts as operating sports facilities and training facilities for racehorses. 

This was judged to be relevant, and at the conclusion of the investigation, Timothy has apologised and said there should have been an interest declared:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am an honorary member of the Jockey Club Rooms, which provides accommodation and function rooms in Newmarket. It is an offshoot of the Jockey Club, and I accepted the membership to support a valued local institution. I declared this in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, but did not repeat the declaration when I tabled four written parliamentary questions regarding the taxation of training yards and racecourses. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards accepted that I tabled the questions because of their relevance to the local economy, and understands that my error was inadvertent. None the less, I accept his advice that I should have declared this interest a second time when I tabled the questions, and I apologise to the House.

We’re happy with this outcome, because we do not think the rules for declarations for written questions are unreasonable, or an especially high bar to meet. If MPs want to accept gifts to support local industries, then yes, they do then need to pay more attention when asking questions that are relevant to those local industries. We hope this apology raises awareness of the rules and encourages others to get the basics right. 

More details of the communications between the Commissioner and Nick Timothy can be read in the evidence pack the Commissioner published. 

What have we learned from this?

Our goal here was not specifically about Nick Timothy, but that this undeclared interest is part of a pattern we had found around undeclared interests in written questions, and we wanted to understand more about making complaints to engage the parliamentary standards process. 

Our key takeaway is that we get a different perspective on the threshold for an investigation from our failed approaches than we did from our initial work reviewing existing cases. 

From reading the Commissioner’s previous decisions it seemed like there was a low bar for the reliance test. However, these are the decisions that were adopted, and may have passed some other criteria to reach that point. Often, the MP themselves have self-referred after receiving an accusation — which may signify from the start that there is something to investigate. 

The key point we took from this is that a member of the public making a complaint needs to draw a clear and direct connection between a specific interest and a specific question. While more indirect arguments can be made (and we’d argue, can be valid), it is at the discretion of the commissioner whether these are adopted. 

Expanding the net

We’ve extended our approach to review 82k written questions asked since June 2025. Based on this we have candidates for future investigation and complaints.

But the initial data matching is the easy part. To go through the complaints system, we need to put research into developing the sharpest examples. Our experience with these first attempts gives us a sense of both the level of detail required, but also where complaints (which might reasonably still highlight violations of the rules) are unlikely to succeed. This helps us prioritise and shape our approach, as well as exploring alternate approaches where we can make better use of our information. 

AI and complaints processes

This also interacts with our thinking about AI and demand on public services, and especially complaints mechanisms. 

We did not use AI to write complaints (which has clear risks in hallucinating specific rules or connections) but did use AI technologies in the data matching — which has dramatically lowered the costs and time of a complicated fuzzy match between the questions and interests datasets. 

Our view is that this makes it easier for us to make legitimate complaints. An exercise of systematically detecting (and complaining about) questions without relevant declarations is much more viable than it would have been a few years ago. 

But resourcing at the other end has not changed, and engaging the standards system requires going through the Commissioner. Alongside that, the Commissioner (alongside other complaints mechanisms) might be seeing an increase in complaint volume from more direct use of AI complaints.

An increase in volume of reports from us (or AI-driven reports in general) might result in the kind of rationing of time where only the most direct examples proceed — which is not what we want: many of the examples that concern us most require a lens that operates with a slightly broader view than that.  

As such, we need to think about when complaints are the right mechanism, versus where we want to be building broader cases about the intersection of public roles and private interests. 

How you can help

Our goal is to raise standards in our political system. What we need most at the moment is time to understand the data we now hold and to develop new pipelines for having an impact with it. 

Your donations help give us that time to dig, research, and build new approaches – that make a real difference to how politics works.

Read more about the work we’re doing. 

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Header image: Photo by Lorenzo Spoleti on Unsplash

Back in May, I gave evidence as part of a panel to the UK Parliament’s procedure committee investigation into parliamentary written questions (WQ), with a focus on the overlap with FOI. 

You can watch the video, or read our written evidence and the transcript of our oral evidence, but in this blog post I’m going to dive into how this issue interacts with issues in the wider FOI/complaints system. 

Why are WQs worse at getting good responses?

We’ve written about the differences between FOI and WQ before, and the basic thing the committee is digging around is that despite on paper they are mostly equivalent regimes, FOI is sometimes more effective at getting information. In theory, this shouldn’t happen. WQs are allowed to take up slightly more official time to answer, and should be answered sooner.

In practice though, FOI can get information released that was denied through WQs — which fits into a general complaint about insubstantial responses to WQs, and gives external validation to the idea that the system is falling short. 

Our theory on this is that it follows back from a key difference between the two regimes. FOI has an appeal system: you can ask for an internal review, and then appeal to the relevant information commissioner and the courts. Additionally FOI and WQs are dealt with by different teams, so while both make decisions based on FOI rules, one has a better sense of external feedback through appeals, and the other does not.

Our pitch as a solution to this is it should be possible to convert a WQ to an FOI after first refusal to access the appeal mechanism. This both gives an immediate point of appeal to parliamentarians, but also grounds the parliamentary affairs team in the practical experience of FOI in the wider ecosystem. 

The FOI appeal system is in trouble

However, tying the WQ process to the FOI appeal system raises the issue that all is not well in how appeals are working at the moment. 

Our research on FOI across Europe really brought home to me the importance of the appeal system as something that keeps the wider system working: the commissioner should not be fixing problems everywhere, but regular and timely decisions and interventions help bring practice at public authorities into sync. In the absence of this, there is little to constrain bad actors in delaying or obstructing a request. 

That’s the theory — but the practice can still present significant obstacles. As Democracy for Sale’s Jenna Corderoy told the committee: 

Unfortunately, though, I want to draw attention to the current FOI appeal system; it is a long and drawn-out process. If you are requesting an internal review, you are looking at 20 to 40 working days to get a response. If you are unhappy and go to the ICO, you are looking at a long time to get a case officer to conduct an assessment of the handling of your request. By the time it goes to the tribunal, you are looking at about a year into the process. In theory, it is good to have an appeal system, but it can unfortunately take a long time, and it takes the sting out of the newsworthiness of your original request.

And this is getting worse, not better. As we heard from both information commissioners at FOI Fest (an FOI conference we ran with the wider FOI Network), the appeals system is under significant strain at the moment, with a massive increase in appeals, likely due to AI. This is not unique to FOI: Martin Rosenbaum has found that there is an increase in volume across ombudsman and complaints processes.

Warren Seddon (ICO)’s evidence to the committee showed the problems this leads to for timeliness of responses:

In the last 12 months, we saw our intake increase by 16% in Q1, 38% in Q2, and then 60% in Q3 and Q4. That is in a context where, historically, over two decades of the FOI Act, you see a 20% to 25% increase every five years. We have seen a massive surge in the number of complaints in the system. Although the evidence is not there to pull that apart in detail, I think AI is probably driving that.

[..]In terms of the impact on performance and how the system is working at the funding levels that we are seeing coming in right now, there is a real concern from our perspective about where we will end up. We are projecting at the moment that, by the end of this financial year, it will take about 16 months to allocate a case, which is not good from our perspective.

A general increase in FOI is distributed over a lot of different authorities, but an increase in complaints means that high intensity casework is channelled in higher quantities to the commissioner’s office. The end result at the moment is an increase (and expected continued increase) in waiting time for cases to be assigned. This causes much wider problems through the system because authorities that want to drag their feet have a realistic understanding that the ICO is going to take a long time to overrule them.

Dealing with increased complaints

We’ve published our thoughts about dealing with AI-driven demand, and for FOI we think this should be a spur towards greater publication of response, converting what can currently be private benefit into a public benefit that helps reduce other requests, but also makes the act of answering a request far more socially valuable because the information is more widely available. 

But this is less the case for the complaints part of the process, which is more resource intensive than answering a request. In some cases, there may be efficiencies to be made, or triage to remove AI-generated complaints that are based on hallucinated ideas of the law. But in general, these complaints are not necessarily illegitimate, and can represent an increase in valid complaints made because the barrier to entry has been lowered. 

Seddon’s evidence brought up that the ICO’s FOI budget for the year (which is set by the government) was, in real terms, a decrease on last year,  which with an increased case load can only lead to more delays.

There isn’t a clever solution to this one — but there is a boring one. Our information commissioners, ombudsman and complaints systems need more money to process an increase in complaints. In the absence of this, the wider public systems they maintain will not have the anchoring of an effective complaint system. There are costs and benefits to AI, and sometimes we’re going to need to pay more as a society to maintain and improve these chokepoints in our redress systems. 

Taking an interest in wider FOI

So to bring this back to Parliament, one of the things we’d like is that Parliament pay attention to FOI. It’s not just a constitutionally good thing, but is part of the information environment of Parliament itself.

MPs make use of FOI themselves: Ben Worthy discussed how FOI and WQs represented different tools that can be used by legislators:

They spoke of using PQs as a very quick and convenient way to obtain some information—one interview described it as a ready-made press release—whereas Freedom of Information lent itself more towards long-term investigative work, digging deeper into an issue or building a national picture. 

But FOI is also part of the wider information environment, leading to both informed public and parliamentary discussion. MPs regularly highlight information released by FOI by journalists, academics and constituents as part of their contributions to debates. 

Along these lines, there were some interesting questions to the Cabinet Office witnesses around how performance data is gathered and judged. It’d be great to see more recognition from Parliament about FOI’s role in supporting public discourse, and how they can support that.

Cost limits

This evidence session also provided an opportunity to get some more information on the record about floated changes to FOI cost limits. Cat Smith (Committee Chair) brought up, unprompted, that the written questions cost limit is currently pegged to 140% of the FOI cost limit, so there is awareness that the two systems are linked. 

Jenna Corderoy pointed out that reduced cost limits would have a negative impact for users of FOI; t that AI shouldn’t be used “as an excuse to reduce cost limits” and that “any reductions on limits are most likely to have a serious impact on the ability to access information that is in the public interest.”. 

I made a point about the potential for improved AI search technologies to make it easier to discover information (not just for FOI, but for the government to better understand itself). 

This also saw the first public comment from ICO on this floated change, with the view that the current limit is broadly working fine:

Warren Seddon: The cost limit has not changed. There has been a bit of debate about it in the past, but it broadly works as it stands. It is well used; if you look at the central Government statistics, around a quarter of refusals are due to the cost limit, so it is in play a lot, and we see it a lot in the complaints that we get.

Interestingly the Cabinet Office witnesses, when given the chance, did not talk a lot about AI-induced demand as a reason to lock down: 

Chair: In your incoming FOI requests, do you see a lot of evidence that AI is playing a role in the input?

Clare Brunton: I do not think so. I asked that question of Eirian before this session. Obviously it is hard to tell because you cannot always tell what is being written by AI, but when you look at the trends of FOIs, there has not been a huge uptick as AI comes in. It has been quite a steady growth. I am sure some of that is AI, but actually it has been a fairly steady growth over the last 20 years or so anyway. We have not noticed any spikes.

Eirian Walsh Atkins: As the earlier panel said, where people are using AI is at the more complex end of FOI, in the complaint stages and in litigation to help them with those slightly trickier processes. I do not think that AI is being used significantly in initial requests to the Cabinet Office.

So this panel provided no strong evidence or opinions that cost limits would solve current problems of FOI, while focusing in on the issue of the complaints system, where a key issue is under-funding of the ICO (and equivalent ombudsman processes).

Better governance need better information

Fundamentally, Freedom of Information has been a massive success that has made the information environment (in public and in parliament) richer. It provides a benchmark to assess that the Parliamentary written questions system is not keeping pace with legal right to information that the Act gives us all. 

But at the same time, it’s not good enough. Both active pushback from government and wider shifts in technology and how public services are run risk making it a less effective and useful system. 

It’s great to see MPs asking questions about FOI, and we hope it’s followed up with more attention paid to this vital constitutional system.

 

Header image: Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash

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