FOI Fest skills session: Ben Worthy
Ben is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, where FOI Fest 2026 took place. In this five-minute talk, Ben shared the innovative ways in which he has used Freedom of Information to understand more about Freedom of Information itself.
FOI Fest was held on 19th February and was co-organised by the FOI Network.
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Transcript:
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:05 [Ben Worthy] Hi everybody. My name is Ben Worthy. I’m an academic here at Birkbeck College, and I’m very aware that only I stand between you and lunch, so I will be as quick as I can.
0:17 Just to remind you, when you do leave for lunch, everybody who’s here in person, do look over at Senate House, because Senate House was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 where his wife worked.
0:31 So I want to talk very briefly about my experience as an academic, which I think is going to be quite distinct from the experience of journalists and campaigners.
0:40 I want to talk to you a little bit about why I use FOI, how I’ve used it, and then end with a few tips for the future. The first really important thing to say, and this is something that both George and Lucas talked about, is it you should only use Freedom of Information if you need to.
0:56 I only use it if I can’t find the information or data any other way. I’m very conscious of the burden that I could create.
1:08 So how have I used it? The main way in which I’ve used it is to try and look across a big picture of how a policy or issue is unfolding across the country.
1:19 What that normally means is local government and making so called ’round robins’ to those bodies. I’ve also made Freedom of Information requests to central government and recently to some of the newly publicly owned train bodies as well.
1:35 In terms of what kind of issues I’ve used it for, I was very interested a few years ago, as they abolished lots of the audit mechanisms across local government, the extent to which people are using their own audit rights.
1:47 You probably all know better than me, that for a few tantalising days each year, you can go to your local council and look through their budgets, either physically or online. So I made a series of FOI requests to see how many people have been availing themselves of that right over the past five years.
2:06 More recently, there’s a lot of talk in the United States about different government departments and bodies using AI as a means to process Freedom of Information requests. So I made a series of FOI requests to central government departments to see if they were doing so. Broadly, the answer is they are not.
2:23 The one that I’m actually most pleased with is one of the most recent ones. I got this from a hint from a Guardian piece of investigation about the aftermath of the dumping of the statue of slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol.
2:39 I was intrigued to what extent councils have been quietly doing different things with their public spaces, because, as you know, councils still retain the power to change street names without public consultation, and I actually discovered through a series of experimental FOI requests to a few councils that actually there has been a lot of quite positive renaming, democratic discussion, QR codes going on up and down the country, in some places that you wouldn’t actually expect.
3:10 What’s probably of most interest to you, though, is I’ve not just used Freedom of Information to find out about things. I’ve used Freedom of Information to find out if Freedom of Information works.
3:20 So I designed this experiment with a group of academics from Kings, and what we did is we used parish councils and we asked a series of them an FOI request, and a series of them something that was very obviously not an FOI request.
3:35 We wrote in big letters at the beginning, “This is not an FOI request”, and we wanted to measure which got the best response. We then took it a step further, and we also asked them to do something outside the boundaries of the Act, which is to publish that piece of information on their website, which they absolutely do not have to do.
3:54 Ta da! Freedom of Information works. A Freedom of Information request was twice as likely to get a response than you just asking. It got even more interesting though, that when we looked at the thing outside the boundary, we asked, “Will you publish this?” a Freedom of Information request was three times more likely to get a public body to respond.
4:21 So just as a few final thoughts:, there are problems with using Freedom of Information. The real bottleneck is actually the basics, finding where to send a Freedom of Information request, getting the right address, especially at local government when things are in constant change, and also getting a response that can be really difficult, especially for much smaller bodies who have my sympathies, sometimes the information doesn’t exist.
4:46 A lot of councilors, for example, didn’t hold any data about who’d looked over their accounts. That’s often because nobody had; but most of them just didn’t hold that information.
4:56 And this is where my life is a bit easier than campaigners’, or journalists. It does take time, but luckily, academia moves much more slowly.
5:10 So finally, my top tips, which are actually rather similar to what have gone before as well, ask yourself why you need it before you make a request. Check their disclosure logs, if they have one.
5:22 Check WhatDoTheyKnow. If you think you’ve had a bright idea for an FOI request, there’s a very good chance someone else has had it at some point before.
5:30 I always use my academic privilege. I scatter the word ‘academic’ all over the email. I tell them about what it is I’m researching. I give them access. I make sure they can see my publications page and things like that, and say why I want the information.
5:45 I also ask nicely, and I try and be very patient and realise that sometimes this can take five or six emails to really clarify what you want, but going back to what George has said and what Martin always says, and is very helpful advice on this: keep a good spreadsheet. That is absolutely the key to making successful FOI requests.
6:09 And just final thoughts for the future. And actually, both Lucas and George mentioned this. I’m really interested in these new bodies that are covered or partly covered by Freedom of Information or EIR, particularly water companies. And also, as of next year, eight out of ten train journeys are going to be in a publicly owned train that’s subject to Freedom of Information. So I’m very interested in how we can actually use those to measure Freedom of Information in the future. Thanks everybody.
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