0:04 Myf: I’m Myfanwy Nixon. I’m Communications and Marketing Manager at mySociety.

0:09 Earlier this year, we found out about this book Our City, edited by Suzanne Audrey. Our City tells the story of a number of different campaign groups in Bristol who were all working to make change, and Suzanne got in touch with us, because lots of those groups, when you read their stories, they had used WhatDoTheyKnow, our Freedom of Information service, to help them with their campaigns.

0:33 We thought it would be really nice if we could sit down and talk to some of those people. We’ve spoken to a number of them, and all of their stories are so interesting.

0:41 In this first one, I talked to Helen Powell of a campaign called We Love Stoke Lodge. And Helen had so many interesting things to say, both about Freedom of Information and about campaigning in general.

0:54 Helen: There is so much that we would not know if it weren’t or being able to make Freedom of Information requests.

1:00 My name is Helen Powell, and I am one of the people involved with We Love Stoke Lodge in Bristol. Stoke Lodge itself is a 23 acre piece of parkland, open space, lots of big mature veteran trees on it, and so on. And it wraps around a grade two listed building, which is Stoke Lodge house, but the parkland has for some years been laid out as playing fields.

1:26 Since 2000 it’s been used by Cotham School, which is a school about three miles away. 

1:30 We know the people and the stories that tie them to the land, people who have lived in these houses around the field for 40 years: they taught their children to ride bikes and fly kites and play football. 

1:41 We know people who learned to walk there again after a stroke. One of my close friends who lost her baby, and she sat under one of the big oak trees on the field, you know, through the time of grieving over that. 

1:52 You know, there are so many people who’ve got a really powerful human connection to the land, and it’s just such a sort of core part of the community that allowing somebody else to come in and just kind of swipe it for their own purposes is just not something that the community is prepared to accept. 

2:14 The correspondence that we discovered under FOI was the school asking the council to remove curtilage status from the land, which would mean that it could put up a fence without asking anybody, without going through any planning process, ultimately, without even having to get landlord consent. 

2:34 For decades, the land had been treated as having curtilage status. Suddenly, it was removed after the school asked for that to happen. Just we all feel this is so wrong. 

2:43 You know, the school had been using the field since 2000, got a lease on the basis that it was going to carry on using it in the same way.

2:54 Putting the fence up around the whole 23 acres in the way that they did was basically privatising what is public land. You know, taking it away from the community. You know, it’s not a small thing to say. 

3:06 You know, the school wants to be able to have a secure playing field while it’s doing PE  —  this is not that. This was the school locking it 24/7, and suddenly what had been important open space for the community was not available.

3:21 I think for the school, the land is a commodity. They see it as an asset that they could develop, they could commercialise, and so on. 

3:27 We saw somebody else had made a request and, “Oh, hang on, if she can ask for that, we could ask for this and that!”. So, yes, it was all very much a learning curve. 

3:41 I had a look back at my list of requests on WhatDoTheyKnow, and you can see at the start, we didn’t necessarily know the rules about, you know, cost constraints, for example.

3:52 So being definite about what period you needed, not making it a ridiculously wide request, but being as specific as you could be, while still getting the information that you were targeting. 

4:07 So you can see us sort of evolving, how good we were at making requests, because that itself is a bit of an art form: phrasing it so that you don’t allow loopholes that don’t allow for interpretation of the request in in a strange way. But also, you know, try trying to make it broad enough for what you want, but not so broad that the authority has a reason to refuse it. 

4:38 There was another person, a completely other third party who asked for some information about different playing fields, and the council turned that down as being a vexatious request that was to do with Stoke Lodge. That got into Private Eye. The next request was mine, and the council turned it down on the basis that while the other person might not have been vexatious, I certainly was vexatious. 

5:01 You know, the ways in which I’d been vexatious included, remarkably, things like asking questions at full council, which was just an exercise of democratic accountability! 

5:10 That went off to the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner said I wasn’t vexatious either, and that that information should be released. 

5:18 None of this was for frivolous reasons. The council has really latched on to this idea of as being a campaign, but we’re not a campaign against the council. We’re not seeking to harass or burden it. We’re a campaign to protect parkland. 

5:33 They may be vexed by the fact that we’re asking a question, but that doesn’t make us vexatious. When we started, and parts of this process, what we were trying to do is in our relationships with, say, the planning team, we were trying to say to them, “Look, you’ve got a large body of very upset people here. If we just have that relationship where we’re communicating with you, where you give us information, then we can pass that on, and we can calm the situation. We can sort of be helpful like that.”

6:00 And I think on a wider scale, that goes for the council as a whole, transparency is good for both sides, because it means that there is greater cultivation of trust. People are more prepared to work in tandem, and I think it’s much more helpful if we can do that. 

6:16 And the point is just that sometimes the council will do something that upsets a lot of people, and if a lot of people then start complaining and asking for information, the council gets very defensive and says, “We can’t cope. You must all be vexatious. Go away. We’re not telling you anything.”

6:32 Whereas, actually, if you have a channel of communication and you say, “OK, you know, we’re releasing this information to you so you can see how we handled this. We believe we did everything right, but you have a look at it”  —  that is a much healthier way to move forward. And actually would, I think, dramatically cut down the number of requests that they get. 

6:53 It has been invaluable. And actually, the particular thing about making those requests via WhatDoTheyKnow is that you can search, and you can see other people’s requests as well. And that also has been very useful. There’s a lot of information to be gained there just by seeing what else is coming out. So it has been fantastically useful. 

7:13 We would not be where we are today without the ability to make those requests. So, most appreciative of WhatDoTheyKnow. It has been an incredible resource.

7:23 Myf: And we just we love to see it being used in really good ways. So thank you again.