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

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

Key points

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

What’s being proposed?

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

Financial Times: UK considers FOI clampdown as requests soar:

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

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

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

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

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

What is the cost limit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are the cost limits changed?

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

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

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

What would be the effect of reducing the cost limit?

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

Who would this affect the most?

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

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

Would it reduce administrative costs?

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

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

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

What is a better approach to FOI volume?

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

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

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

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

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

Read other responses

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

Header image: Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

Get involved

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

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

Today we’re launching a new report: Shifting Landscapes: A practical guide to pro democratic tech.

This report builds on the conferences, seminars and conversations we’ve been having in our TICTeC programme over the last few years, to present a comprehensive picture of where pro democratic tech is now. We explore how technology can strengthen and defend democratic life, and how civic tech practitioners, pro-democracy organisations, and funders can make effective choices in a rapidly shifting landscape for both democracy and technology.

The result is a report of eight chapters in four thematic areas:

Pro-democracy tech: this extends our definition of pro-democracy tech, to explore how  technology can be joined to wider democratic movements working to both defend and extend democracy using technology.

Communities of practice: what we’ve learned about how we can best work together with our communities of practice around Access to Information and democratic transparency, balancing efficiencies of scale with unique circumstances and needs.

Shaping the landscape: Civic tech sometimes needs to adapt to changing times, but should be trying to shape the times. These chapters look at changing distribution methods (video and AI chatbots), but also how we can create infrastructure that makes democratic projects easier and more effective.

Using technology effectively: These chapters are aimed at practitioners thinking about how to use technology, with examples and frameworks for practical approaches to AI technologies, but also other examples of tools that can be effective in ways that AI approaches can’t. 

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

Header image: photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Header image: Photo by Meg on Unsplash

Understanding more about constituent communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full report can be read here.

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Image: Christopher Burns

The UK has two Freedom of Information laws – one that covers Scottish public authorities and one that covers public authorities in the rest of the UK. While similar to the UK law in many respects, we think there are a number of practical ways the Scottish system improves on the wider system of FOI in the UK. 

While being better than the UK law is a good start, our sights should be set a lot higher than that: Freedom of Information needs to keep pace with how the world has changed, the changing ways public services are delivered, and huge shifts in how information can be stored and shared. 

Currently there is a Private Member’s Bill going through the Scottish Parliament with a combination of practical fix-ups to problems that have emerged, and bigger picture changes to encourage better proactive publication of information.

Last month, the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee invited views on the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill, which aims to modernise and strengthen the existing law. Our submission welcomed the Bill as a timely and proportionate improvement to an already effective system.

In addition to our written evidence, we were delighted to be invited to give oral evidence to the committee. You can watch Alex’s evidence session here.

Overall we’re really supportive of this effort to update the FOI system in Scotland, and as Alex said to the committee, we’re especially pleased to see proposals for a new proactive publication duty. 

This change would help public bodies make information available as a matter of course, reducing the need for requests and ensuring that information, once released, is accessible to everyone. In our research on fragmented public data, we’ve shown how better coordination and consistent publication practices can unlock huge public value. The Bill’s provisions around proactive publication are a welcome step towards achieving this.

This feels like a key moment for transparency enthusiasts to unite around the opportunity to make Scotland’s FOI system even better, and we’re delighted to play our part.

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Image: Chris Flexen

Our WriteToThem website makes it easy for anyone to send an email to their elected representatives. That’s the core concept, and it works brilliantly for millions of users every year — but that said, we’re aware that even when a website is simple and built with usability at its core, not everyone has an equal ability to access it.

As part of our warm up for a new programme of work on WriteToThem, we’ve published some of our internal research from a few years ago on messages written on behalf of someone else — what we’re calling ‘proxy use’. 

The reasons for this are easy to understand: the primary subject may not be confident at writing in English; may be elderly or have a condition that makes it easier to delegate the task of writing; or may generally use internet services through intermediaries.

The key findings are:

• A small group of users (5%) were writing on behalf of someone else.
• Proxy messages made up 6.8% of messages to local councillors, and 4.5% of messages to MPs. This would account for an estimated 55,000 messages to MPs through the service in 2019.
• The largest group was people who were writing on behalf of family (40%), but there were also people writing on behalf of local groups (40%), friends or people they knew (12%), and service providers writing to representatives on behalf of clients (8%). Messages on behalf of clients from carers would have accounted for an estimated 7,500 messages in 2019.

We’re about to embark on research and development work around WriteToThem, and these findings will contribute to our understanding around making it easier to get the right type of message to the right place.

If you are interested to dig deeper into everything we discovered around proxy usage, take a look at the full piece of research here.