How Climate Emergency UK use FOI requests to make previously unseen datasets
Climate Emergency UK are mySociety’s partners in the Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which score every UK council across dozens of measures. In aggregate, the scores give councils a clear way to see how they’re doing, and concerned citizens a useful tool to scrutinise their own local authorities.
But not all the information needed for the Scorecards is openly available. In this short talk from FOI Fest, Isaac Beevor explains how Freedom of Information has solved that problem.
FOI Fest was a one-day conference from mySociety in February 2026.
*** Please fill in our short survey so that we can understand more about who listens to these podcasts, and why! Thank you. ***
Further info
Transcript
0:00 [Isaac Beevor] I’m Isaac. And I really appreciate actually, how Alex said my last name. It’s Isaac Beevor. But if you want to say it Isaac Bee-VOR, then that’s absolutely fantastic. So thank you.
0:09 So I’m Isaac, I come from Climate Emergency UK. We rate councils through the Council Climate Action Scorecards. It’s the only UK-wide assessment of councils and their climate action and we use FOIs for a limited number of questions, because we consistently hear from councils that we absolutely shouldn’t use them, but we consistently tell them that we should for a number of different reasons, and the reasons we use them, obviously, is because we think that a lot of this information isn’t very publicly available, and councils don’t often publish that information in a very standard format, either, and if we asked them, and we didn’t use FOIs in the same way, then we are unlikely to get a consistent response.
0:49 We actually get around 95% of councils answer FOIs, so it’s a really good way of like actually getting that information. We ask about the average EPC rating of social housing. We ask about what renewable tariffs they use in terms of procuring their own energy, but also what energy, if they produce any renewable energy themselves.
1:08 This one of my favorite ones. We ask about the minimum energy efficiency standard enforcement, which is how they’re enforcing standards with private landlords. And then other questions we ask about is their staff capacity in terms of climate – so if they’ve got staff on retrofit; planning ecologists to enforce biodiversity net gain; and the staff they have on climate, and we also ask two FOIs solely to the Mayoral authorities as well, which is around the percentage of electric busses in their fleets and also their green skills training. So, how many people have been trained in green skills courses in there, and across their area that they provide.
1:43 So this is some of the stuff that we do. One of the things that I think is why I’ve been asked to come here, is that we manage these FOIs in a lot of different ways. We obviously send these FOIs to about 400 UK councils, and so there’s around 4,000 questions and FOIs that we actually have to manage.
2:01 And one of the ways that we do this is by using volunteers who actually turn up to do the quite unsexy work of marking and assessing councils on their climate action, but also processing all of these FOIs to create the Action Scorecards as well. So we trained about 50 residents last year, who worked with us and volunteered with us to process and capture the data for more these Freedom of Information requests. We estimate that’s around 700 hours of volunteering across the whole board.
2:30 And we also train these volunteers outside of just how to use FOIs, but also in the Local Climate Policy programme, which is our introduction and and course into what councils are doing on climate and how they work. And we think the Council Climate Action Scorecards as a whole is the largest UK citizen data project on climate. And obviously the Scorecards are powered by volunteers, so over 250 volunteers got involved in the Scorecards and how they work, with 50 of those managing and capturing the data from the Freedom of Information requests that we sent.
3:06 This is some of the headlines from the data that we got in 2025. So there’s only four mayoral authorities that have over 10% of the bus fleet that’s electric. There’s only 35% of local authorities that have lobbied the UK Government on climate action, which is down from from previous years. It’s gone down from 43% to 35% – we think that’s because less Labour councils are lobbying a Labour government, which is really a shame.
3:31 We also have seen councils drop their use of renewable energy tariffs as well. We think that’s partly down to cost and budget saving. One of the things that I think is a real shame is that only 37% of councils are actually conducting investigations or enforcing the energy efficiency standards on landlords, which is one of their main powers to ensure that housing is dealt with in across their local area.
3:56 And some of the good stuff is that they have worked really hard in terms of getting the energy efficiency of their social housing higher, and their employment of different staff to help them do that.
4:08 Some of the impact that we’ve had is that we have secured multiple exclusives over the years. So if there’s any journalists in the room that want to work with us in future, we’ve got different stories into lots of different papers. So some of these in the i, obviously, on the electric bus fleet, but also on the minimum energy efficiency standards.
4:28 We also got a story, as well, on the council housing and the average of energy efficiency of it, into the Financial Times. So we think that’s one of the best ways that, obviously we’re compiling this data that’s not easily available, and across the whole of the UK. And so we’ve had quite a bit of interest from journalists into the different stories that are able to produce.
4:48 And then just a little bit on our impact as a whole across all of the Scorecards. So we have over 85,000 people have used the Scorecards website in the first six months, since launching, and we’ve had over 100 media hits in total, which includes, obviously, the i, BBC London and lots of other local media outlets.
5:07 And crucially, and this is why we create the Scorecards, and we have councils and campaigners using the Scorecards. And there’s a quote here from Lucie Bolton who is the climate officer at Rother District Council, which is says that “I’m now using the Scorecards regularly in the implementation of the Climate Action Plan”, and that’s the kind of impact that we want to see in terms of council climate officers, but also campaigners using the Scorecards to actually push their councils to go further and faster with climate action.
5:35 And that’s because what we believe is, is that if you actually provide better data, more publicly available data alongside, you know, people pushing internally and externally the council, as you lead to more effective and further and faster climate action. Finished! All good. Thanks so much.
5:53 [Myf Nixon] Hello to our most completist listeners. If you’re still listening, thank you so much for sticking with this right to the end. I’m Myf from mySociety, and it’s my job to put these podcasts together. And you know what? It would be really helpful for us to know a bit more about how and why you are listening to them. So if you have a moment, please do take a look at the shownotes, where you’ll find a link to a very short survey. It’d help us so much if you could fill that in. Thank you.