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/RSS FeedWe Love Stoke Lodge is a campaign group in Bristol, and the subject of one of the chapters of the book Our City, edited by Suzanne Audrey. Many of the campaigns featured in the book used WhatDoTheyKnow and FOI to uncover vital information to support their campaigns. Hear Helen Powell describe the group’s experiences of campaigning to save a beloved piece of land for public use, and what they discovered thanks to FOI.
If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.
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Apologies to Cllr McKeown for pronouncing his name wrongly in this video! Here’s a better pronunciation.
The Council Climate Action Scorecards is a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK.
Annie from Climate Emergency UK chatted to Cllr Mike McKeown, Cabinet Lead for Climate Change and Sustainability at Cotswold District Council, about how they’ve used the Scorecards to improve their climate action — and some of the barriers they still face from a national level in delivering Net Zero.
How does AI know so much?
We always begin by asking how people first come across our sites, and the answers are rarely surprising: through word of mouth, via the events we do, et cetera. But Councillor McKeown’s answer was a new one on us:
“I first discovered the Scorecards via Chat GPT. I use AI a lot in my day job and when I was elected a councillor in May 2023, I asked Chat GPT for an assessment of my councils’ climate action. It came back with quite a detailed answer, so I asked it where it got this information from, and it explained that this information was found from the Council Climate Action Scorecards site.”
Good to know the robots are on board! But no matter how people find the Scorecards, the result is the same: a rich source of useful and applicable data.
Looking inwards and outwards
“I’ve used the Scorecards in two main ways,” explains Councillor McKeown. “Firstly, to create pressure for, and focus on, our work on climate action. I presented the Scorecards at a council cabinet meeting and showed how our results compared across other councils in Gloucestershire. This was a useful level set for our council to see where we actually sat and how we could improve.
“It is helpful to be able to point to an independent assessment of our council’s climate action, and use the ranking that the Scorecards give us as a way to push for further actions in areas where we didn’t do so well.
“I know myself and some of the councillors were surprised when the Scorecards came out that we didn’t have a higher score. And this reaction has been used to drive our work to ensure that our score will improve for the next Scorecards. We’ve used the Scorecards at a senior management level to see a general oversight of where we’re at, as well as at a micro level, to understand specific project work with staff.”
A framework for action
How does the council keep track of work at every level?
“We’ve set up a Climate Board as a way to review and monitor it. I brought it in after participating in the Climate Leadership Academy by UK100, who recommend a Climate Board within councils. It’s basically a series of regular meetings with senior officers from across the council.
“One of the resources we used to review our climate work is the Scorecards. We use them as a framework to see what our current answers are and what we need to do to improve. We also plan to use the Scorecards going forward to monitor our progress.”
Real life results
Have there been any positive impacts yet?
“Yes – I’d like to share a climate project of ours which links directly to one of the Scorecards questions. We’ve secured funding from the South West Net Zero Hub to employ a retrofit officer. They’re going to be going out into the community to talk to residents and work with them to understand what retrofit is and encourage them to take the next steps to make a difference to their homes.
“We’re also part of a partnership with all other district councils in Gloucestershire and other public sector organisations, called Climate Leadership Gloucestershire. As part of this, we have launched the retrofit centre.
“This is a website that provides advice to residents on how to retrofit their homes. They can either use the site to create their own retrofit plan through the website portal, or they can reach out to be connected with a person who can come and do an assessment of their home in person. The site also includes a list of trusted suppliers for different aspects of home retrofit work.”
The solution for a more effective transition
Councillor McKeown then went on to explain some of the barriers to council climate action and suggested a solution.
“For so much of our work, the biggest barrier is resource rather than money. Often we don’t have the people able to deliver the work — so funding that doesn’t include the budget to cover additional staff to deliver the work isn’t as helpful.
“For example, we’re seeing if we can extend the deadline by which we have to spend some funding from the Department of Transport on installing EV chargers. Many of the car parks in our area have national monument status — lots of Roman ruins! — so they require additional planning permission which takes time to secure. We do want to install the EV chargers and we’re sure the Department of Transport won’t want the money back, but we need more time to actually install them.
“This is just one example of why a fully funded statutory duty would be so helpful for councils to more effectively deliver Net Zero. Currently, so much of what councils do for Net Zero is as a result of goodwill: it is beyond our statutory duty and we do it because we and our residents care.”
Many thanks to Councillor McKeown for sharing his experiences.
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Bracknell Forest Council don’t just comply with the Council Climate Action Scorecards marking — they proactively publish all the relevant information on their website.
Climate Emergency UK’s assessment of all UK councils on the actions they’ve taken towards net zero is a complex process that involves seeking the required evidence from each council. As you can imagine, when we discovered that Bracknell Forest had put it all in one place ready for the marking process, we were very impressed.
We spoke to Will Barnes, Climate Change Officer, to find out more. How did the council first come across the Scorecards?
“Originally, it was one of our councillors who brought them to the attention of council officers. With climate change being a top priority for the council, both councillors and officers have gone on to take a particular interest in the Scorecards methodology and results.”
As Will continues, he confirms our belief that the Scorecards are not just a useful tool for the public: they also provide an invaluable service for councils themselves.
“We now use the Scorecards as one way of having our climate action independently and externally assessed.
“We use it as a way of marking our progress on tackling climate change as a council, and benchmarking ourselves against how other single tier councils are doing, and what they are doing too.
“To support this process, we have been centralising answers and evidence on the council website to assist the scorecard markers and to make this information available to the public too.”
We are so impressed to hear this, on many levels. Of course, we’re very grateful that the work of assessing the council has been made easier; but we also admire the transparency with which Bracknell Forest has approached the project, for the benefit of the public.
We’ve heard how the Scorecards help the council and the general public. There’s one more person benefitting — Will himself.
“Having started in my role as Climate Change Officer four months ago, I’ve found that the Scorecards have helped me to understand the climate action already taking place across all corners of the council.
“They’ve also helped me to identify potential opportunities for further projects which we could implement in support of our ambition to be net zero by as close to 2030 as possible.
The climate change team work to embed and promote sustainable practices and initiatives across the council, and the Scorecards have provided us with ideas for action and have supported us to put projects forward to various teams for consideration.
“In doing so, they’ve played a part in the progress that has been made on a range of projects since the 2023 Scorecards. For instance, we now have a social value policy in place that aligns procurement and contracting activity with our commitment to address the climate emergency and achieve net-zero carbon emissions.
“One of the workstreams of our new business change project is focused on delivering carbon awareness training across council teams, and the Public Protection Partnership (PPP) have developed a project plan to enforce the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) for privately rented domestic properties in the borough.
“Projects like these will help us to achieve our ambitions of tackling climate change and reducing emissions in Bracknell Forest.”
That’s great — thanks very much to Will for sharing his experiences. We don’t think we’ve come across any other councils proactively publishing their evidence like this before, but as we hope this case study shows, it’s beneficial all round. Perhaps others will follow where Bracknell Forest leads. We hope so!
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Image: Alan Hunt (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit: bring them together, and amazing things can happen — as we’ve discovered from one of our users.
We’ve been talking to Yasmin Marsh, who, as part of a small collective of NHS doctors and staff named PA Project Watch group, is investigating concerns around the use of under-qualified medical staff in NHS hospitals and GP surgeries. With a combination of facts received through Freedom of Information requests, and on the ground experience from members of the r/DoctorsUK subreddit, they’ve created a change in policy in at least one NHS Trust.
What is a PA?
We asked Yasmin to explain the basics of PA Project Watch’s campaign to us, and anyone else who might not know the finer details of how the NHS functions. So first of all, what does the PA in the group’s name refer to?
“It’s ‘Physician Associate‘, a role previously known as a ‘Physician Assistant’,” she explained.
“A PA is a member of the healthcare team who works under the supervision of a senior doctor to help care for patients. You can train to become a PA with a 24 month MSc or PgDip.
“The role was originally designed so that PAs would always work under the supervision of senior doctors and assist the medical team in caring for patients.”
The trouble with PAs
OK, so what’s the issue with PAs?
“Because no official rules have been set around what they can or can’t do”, says Yasmin, “they’ve been used inappropriately by NHS hospitals and GP surgeries to replace doctors.”
In these stretched times, it’s perhaps inevitable that shortages are being addressed by any means possible? Yasmin agrees:
“You can see the temptation for NHS managers and GP surgeries — if there are doctor shortages, fill the gaps with PAs instead. They’re also cheaper than doctors!”
Yasmin told us that the General Medical Council are planning to introduce regulation later this year, but meanwhile, there are potential dangers around this situation.
“I’ve seen first-hand the problems of using PAs,” she said. “It comes back to the old saying ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. As they’ve only done a 24 month course, they miss covering lots of important topics, and the topics they do cover are only covered in superficial depth, skimming over lots of important medical topics briefly. There’s a reason medical school is five to six years!
“So, for example, when looking at a patient’s blood tests, I’ve seen a PA miss a common critical abnormality because they simply lacked knowledge — they’d never been taught about that particular blood test abnormality or what it means. If you speak to doctors, these types of errors are happening through the use of PAs up and down the country.”
So how critical is it?
“There have been several deaths of patients due to mistakes made by PAs, which have been reported by the BBC1, the Manchester Evening News2, and in two stories from the Telegraph3.”
WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit
So that certainly explains the groups’ concerns, and their desire to do something about it — now, how did WhatDoTheyKnow and Freedom of Information come into the picture?
Yasmin hadn’t been fully familiar with the concept before: “I had heard of FOI requests, but I never knew they could be submitted by anybody. I thought you had to be a journalist or an investigator to submit them. However, I found WhatDoTheyKnow through Google when looking for another topic about my local council, and then discovered that anyone could send them.”
And what about the link with Reddit? Yasmin’s shared FOI responses as the group has received them, allowing for vital scrutiny of the information provided, from those working in the settings in question, who are able to compare the responses with their own experiences.
“Reddit has been central to this campaign. I’d really emphasise the role of the /r/DoctorsUK community. Without them, this would not have been possible.”
A strong example comes from the FOI request sent to Torbay Hospital.
“We received a message from a Reddit user who said this hospital was using PAs inappropriately to replace doctors, often in the paediatric department, but also covering other gaps in the hospital rota like the surgery and medicine departments.
“After this message, I sent an FOI request to the hospital, asking them how many times doctors had been replaced by PAs. They replied:
None, physician associates are not permitted to cover doctor’s shifts.
“We then posted this on the r/DoctorsUK community asking if this was true, and for any evidence that PAs were replacing doctors. We received testimony from paediatric nursing staff and a rota, showing that PAs regularly replaced doctors in the paediatric department. This demonstrated that the hospital’s response was false.
“We then challenged the hospital’s response by requesting an internal review, which led to them admitting that PAs did cover rota gaps in paediatrics and other departments.
“Did they deliberately try to cover up the situation? Or was this an administrative mistake? We’ll never know. Without Reddit, we would have just accepted the original response and never pushed for the internal review.”
Real-life results
And as for whether the request has had any impact? Yasmin confirms that the Trust says they’ve now stopped substituting PAs for doctors.
PA Project Watch continue in their work. “We’re now asking other hospitals to see if they have been substituting doctors for PAs, and uncovered further evidence: for example, Royal Berkshire sent us a spreadsheet of shifts where PAs had covered for doctors. This story was featured in the Daily Mail, although unfortunately without a credit.”
And perhaps as a further effect of this campaigning, doctors are now taking legal action against the General Medical Council, because while the GMC is planning to regulate PAs as Yasmin points out, “they could still technically do anything a doctor could do.
“This is the central argument of the Anaesthetists United legal case — they want the GMC to create a clear set of limits on the tasks PAs can perform, to avoid them being used inappropriately.”
But Yasmin’s clear where the problem lies and it’s not with the PAs themselves. “They’ve been let down by their leadership at the Faculty of Physician Associates, taken advantage of by the NHS, and thrust into roles for which they are unqualified and underprepared.
“Unfortunately, the NHS culture makes it really difficult to speak up about these issues. We’re trying to shine a light on what’s happening, and FOI gives us the power to do this — but we’re finding many Trusts are now refusing to answer requests about PAs, and we’re having to involve the ICO more and more.”
Thanks so much to Yasmin for sharing this important campaign. It’s great to see the journey from FOI novice to FOI expert!
It’s clear that the group now has enough knowledge to request an internal review to challenge an erroneous response, and to appeal to the ICO when an authority hasn’t met their responsibilities under the FOI Act — and we’re glad that WhatDoTheyKnow has been part of that learning process, not to mention the results that have come from it.
Video summary:
1 BBC: Misdiagnosis: Bereaved mum calls for physician associate role clarity
2 Manchester Evening News: Gran died after ‘physician’s associate’ left treatment in place for 16 HOURS longer than allowed
3 The Telegraph: Man died from rare heart problem after being discharged from hospital
Family of film make-up artist call for inquest after treatment by physician associate—
Image: implusq
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How do you bring about systemic change within structures that are embedded into the national culture? That’s a big question, but it’s one that users of our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow are often tussling with.
One place to start is with data that helps you map the current state of affairs, and FOI can be the perfect medium for getting hold of that. When we spoke to Jack Russell from Parents for Inclusive Education (PfIE), a grassroots organisation of primary school parents in Northern Ireland, he explained the value of data very well: “it means you can start a conversation”.
So, what are PfIE trying to achieve?
“We came together because we want to see a more inclusive primary education for every child” – and they’re starting with religious education.
“We realised that, for many parents, there was a lack of clarity around how RE is delivered in Northern Ireland, and what rights parents have in this area.”
PfIE wanted to gather data on who comes into schools to deliver RE lessons, collective worship and assemblies. Their aim was to achieve an accurate, representative picture of practices across Northern Ireland, as opposed to their baseline assumptions which, as they admit, had up until then been based on anecdotal evidence.
From small beginnings
And so began a large-scale FOI project — although initially the team had much more modest plans:
“At first, we were only going to contact our own schools to ask them who was given access and how this was communicated.
“But then we realised that other parents might want to be informed about these practices at their schools — and they were entitled to answers too. So we decided to send a Freedom of Information request to every publicly funded primary school in Northern Ireland, apart from special schools: that was 772 in total.”
The organisation had some tech expertise amongst its members, and, as they explained, at first it seemed that WhatDoTheyKnow wouldn’t quite be suitable for their needs:
“One of our team — Laura — had successfully used WhatDoTheyKnow in the past to query hospitals about their waitlist times for outpatient appointments, so she suggested using it. But after some initial research, we decided not to, as we’d wanted to include attachments and links in our requests.
“I’d written a script to batch send them all, but it turned out that these were heavily spam filtered by the schools’ email server, so we fell back on WhatDoTheyKnow.
“I’m really glad we did, as the fact that all correspondence will be public is a huge plus for us.”
Managing batch FOI requests
So, how did PfIE manage their 772 FOI requests? They signed up for our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro service, which is designed specifically to help keep track of large batches like this, and also allows users to keep their requests and responses private until they’re ready to release their findings.
“We focused our questions around two areas: first, access: which churches and religious organisations were being given access to schools, and how that access was managed via processes and/or controls; and secondly communication: whether and how parents were made aware of religious visitors; and were informed about the options to withdraw their children from religious practices.
“We asked 14 questions in total, some of which were yes/no or multiple choice, others which required free-form answers.”
FOI allows the request-maker to specify the format they’d like to receive their responses in, which can save a lot of data-cleansing further down the line. As Jack acknowledges,”we received submissions back from schools in varied formats, including Word and PDF attachments, and also as plain or rich text email replies.”
It was all useful, though. “The data we collected provides us with an objective, fully representative sample — we had a 99% reply rate — to gain an accurate understanding of RE practices in Northern Ireland primary schools.
“We understand this response level to be unprecedented, according to academics we’ve spoken to who have conducted similar research. Our project is primarily focused on making data transparently available to parents, so from this perspective the 99% number is hugely encouraging. It also means that any aggregate conclusions we draw are as close to being unbiased as possible — we actually have a response rate that is higher than the NI Census 2021 (97%) which people were legally required to complete.”
Tenacious in the face of challenges
Getting to this gratifying result wasn’t all plain sailing, though. Jack explained the issues they encountered along the way:
“Some schools initially mistrusted the FOI request email that came through WhatDoTheyKnow, and didn’t know whether they had to reply. However, a couple of weeks after we sent the request out, the Northern Irish Education Authority issued guidance instructing schools to reply, providing an information document and template response.”
In any large batch of FOI requests there will be a variety of levels of response, and PfIE came across this too.
“There were non-responses, partial responses and responses with an incorrect understanding of the question. Our first technique to remedy these was by following up via WhatDoTheyKnow, which provided alerts and tools which made this very easy to do — another reason I’m very glad we went with the platform!”
Fortunately, the FOI Act has a provision for dealing with non-responders: referring them to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
“For persistent non-repliers, we contacted the ICO, who very diligently helped us further encourage schools to respond.
“But several of the schools that responded late, following an ICO decision notice, sent their responses to our own email account, meaning that the responses didn’t appear on WhatDoTheyKnow. The team at WhatDoTheyKnow were very helpful in adding these: I sent through several batches of .eml files and they made sure they appeared within the conversation.”
On a mission
So how will PfIE be sharing their findings? They are launching a report today, On A Mission, with an event at Stormont. They’ve also created an online map to help people explore the data.
But they’re not stopping there: “After releasing the findings of our report, we plan to create resources and a set of best practices for schools to achieve a more inclusive RE experience for all students. We also plan to engage and empower parents, hopefully promoting a sense of transparency and open dialogue between the school and parental community.
“Beyond this, we have several other plans to empower parents, increase transparency and improve the education system in Northern Ireland”.
And that’s how you start to make change
PfIE have used the mechanism available to them to produce exactly the outcome they were after.
“The tools provided by mySociety, together with help from the ICO in chasing up the late responders, and the cooperation of the NI Education Authority in doing the same have been invaluable in achieving this level of response,” says Jack.
“We would definitely recommend WhatDoTheyKnow. The tools have been really useful in managing a large scale request, and the fact that all correspondence will be publicly searchable and visible is invaluable: it adds a great deal of credibility to our research by effectively underwriting our findings with an auditable trail of evidence.
“And on top of this, the team have been super-helpful and a pleasure to work with! “
We’re glad to have been of service. Thanks very much to Jack for talking us through the project. If you’d like to know more, visit the PfIE website, where you can also sign up to their newsletter to be kept informed.
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Image: Priscilla Du Preez
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Lucie Bolton took the position of Climate Strategy Officer at Rother District Council in 2022. Since then, she’s found the Council Climate Action Scorecards project an invaluable support for her work.
Hearing this, we were of course keen to find out more — so we asked Lucie to share her journey, from brand new climate officer to now, a couple of years on, with a refreshed strategy and action plan in place.
“The council had declared a Climate Emergency in September 2019, going on to adopt their Environment Strategy in 2020”, explains Lucie, “But the pandemic and staff changes meant the production of a Climate Action Plan was delayed. That’s not to say climate action wasn’t taking place, but there were no KPIs, and it wasn’t fully embedded across the organisation.”
“Scorecards helped us reimagine both our content and project design.”
Post pandemic, recognising a need for a more concerted approach, the council employed two new staff: Lucie as Climate Strategy Officer, plus a new Climate Project Officer.
“I was brought in to refresh the Environment Strategy — which was renamed the Climate Strategy — and to develop and deliver the Climate Action Plan.”
While Lucie had highly relevant experience in her background, the council context was new for her:
“I came from an environmental NGO, where I was involved with developing strategies, but I hadn’t developed a Climate Strategy for a local authority before.
“I performed the usual strategy development activities — gap analysis, evidence base and so on — and when I was looking at best practices across the sector, I came across the Council Climate Plan Scorecards.”
The Climate Plan Scorecards, released in 2022, were the precursor to the Climate Action Scorecards. They scrutinised every UK council’s action plans, marking them to a wide set of criteria.
“This was a fantastic resource for me,” says Lucie, “as I was able to see what good looks like and what we should be aiming for.
“I used the Scorecards to look at neighbouring authorities, authorities with similar emissions, demographics et cetera. Along with other resources like the UK100 Powers in Place report, it helped me shape the Rother District Council Climate Strategy.
“I was also able to reach out to different authorities and speak to their Climate Officers, which was useful.”
In 2023, the Council Climate Action Scorecards were launched, providing Lucie with still more invaluable data.
“I found the methodology particularly useful for developing Rother District Council’s Climate Action Plan. It was also useful to benchmark against, to see what we have already achieved and where we could do better”.
“This was a fantastic resource for me, as I was able to see what good looks like and what we should be aiming for.”
“Overall, the results were useful in demonstrating to colleagues the sort of things we could be doing and what our neighbouring authorities were doing.”
Rother District Council adopted the refreshed Climate Strategy and Climate Action Plan in December 2023, and Lucie continues to dip into the Scorecards.
“I am now using them regularly in the implementation of the Climate Action Plan. For example, we have an action to eliminate pesticide usage in the council’s grounds maintenance. Using the Scorecards, I can quickly find examples of other councils who have already done this, and access the information I need through the evidence links.
“I’m really pleased to hear there will be another round of council scoring. I think Rother District Council will score better thanks to the action we have taken since the first round of scoring, though I am concerned the timeframe will mean some significant activities will still be in progress. Our new Local Plan, for example, is aiming to be ambitious and align with our 2030 target, but is unlikely to be ready to be examined in that round.”
Thanks very much to Lucie for sharing her story. We hope it inspires other Climate Officers to explore how the Scorecards project can aid them in their work.
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Image: Chris McAuley (CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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Give Food is an independent UK charity, founded in early 2020. They run the only national public database of UK foodbanks, and provide an up-to-date index of what goods each one is asking to be donated.
Founder Jason Cartwright spoke to us about how Give Food makes use of TheyWorkForYou’s email alerts — and we were pleased to discover that mySociety has helped shape their offerings in other ways, too.
Find a foodbank near you
The Give Food website performs a number of related functions, as Jason explains: “We help members of the public understand that there are foodbanks around them, then give them tools to donate the items that are needed or to take political action.”
Put in your postcode and you’ll be shown a list and a map of all the foodbanks near you. If you click on one of them, you’ll see what they need, what they already have plenty of, and where you can drop donations — or in some cases, how you can purchase goods online and have them delivered directly to the foodbank.
“We aim to help local organisations address the immediate and critical needs created by food insecurity, but the wider ultimate aim is to not exist at all, as we believe that foodbanks should not be required in our country.”
Turning alert emails into action
As this suggests, Give Food is not just a middleman between citizens and foodbanks, but also acts as a political campaigning organisation. So where do the TheyWorkForYou alerts come in?
“We use them heavily,” says Jason, “basically to inform ourselves of what is being discussed by lawmakers around our cause.
“We’re only small, but larger charities in our field are experts at engaging the public and politicians to achieve the same aims as us, and regularly directly influence policy.
“TheyWorkForYou alerts allow us to see, almost in real time, which of the approaches they are using are cutting through to being discussed in Parliament and national/city assemblies.
“We use the information about how conversation around our cause is going to influence how we approach our advertising, site usability and copy — all of which allows our users to maximise their political action.
“For instance, as a simple example, the current cost of living crisis, especially energy bills, is having a profound effect on foodbanks. Seeing this being discussed by politicians we were able to quickly change our advertising keywords and also reflect the current conversation in the form email our users can send to their MP.”
Open source code
It’s great to hear of such a direct connection between our output and a charity’s ability to act. And, as it turned out, the alerts aren’t the only benefit that Give Food have gained from mySociety.
One more useful function of the Give Food website is that you can sign up to receive an email when your local foodbank needs supplies. This isn’t powered by our code, but Jason tells us that it was modelled on TheyWorkForYou’s alerts system.
Finally, there’s one more important way in which we’ve influenced Give Food: “Our code and data is all open source, and that decision was 100% influenced by mySociety’s open ethos.
“Our data is used by governments, councils, universities, supermarkets, political parties, hundreds of national & local news websites, apps, plus other charities including food banks and food bank networks themselves,” says Jason, proving that when data is set free, it can be used in a multitude of different and useful tools.
If you’re a developer and you think Give Food’s data or code might be useful to you, start on their API page.
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Thanks very much to Jason for talking to us: it’s a joy to discover the many and varied ways in which TheyWorkForYou alerts are helping others to make a difference.
Image: FeydHuxtable (CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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You might know our WriteToThem service as an easy way to contact your representatives – which it definitely is! But did you realise that it’s also doing heavier lifting, helping proposed legislation gain support in Parliament?
We’ve already seen how Power for People have mobilised their supporters this way: and Zero Hour is also running a successful campaign around a draft Bill.
Zero Hour’s campaign centres around the Climate and Ecology Bill, in which they lay out a comprehensive and joined-up approach to the climate and nature emergency. A cornerstone of their strategy relies on getting their supporters to contact their representatives and ask them for their backing. We asked Amy McDonnell, co-Director of Zero Hour to give us a bit more background and to explain the thinking behind the Bill.
Amy explained, “It’s the only current or proposed legislation that tackles the interconnected nature-climate emergency together.
“We formed the campaign to provide a pathway to getting cross-party support for a legislative solution that will ensure that the UK delivers a science-led, people-powered plan on biodiversity and climate.”
We were interested to know more about how rallying individuals can pave the way to change.
Amy told us, “We’ve always depended on our grassroots movement. MPs really care about what their constituents think, and writing to them is incredibly impactful. Moving forwards, we know that we can only win with people on the ground by turbocharging our activity in Parliament.”
So how did they make the decision to bring WriteToThem onto their website?
“We knew that we needed an integrated tool on our site. The WriteToThem tool was key, as we recognise that people’s priorities are stretched and time is precious. So we used WriteToThem to ensure that supporters could contact the MP where they live with the click of a button.
“This has been incredibly effective, with thousands of our supporters asking their MPs to support the Climate and Ecology Bill. Having the mechanism to write to MPs with ease has been crucial to the success of the campaign to date, providing insightful responses and opening opportunities for our team to have engaging conversations with members of all political parties on how we can all work together to create an integrated strategy to tackle nature-climate emergency together.”
WriteToThem doesn’t allow for mass, identical messages from users, and we were curious to know whether that had created any kind of challenge. Quite the reverse, as it turns out:
“We’ve found that fewer, personalised messages are a lot more impactful than thousands of standard emails, which can easily be blocked and ignored.
“Our approach has always been to maximise not just the action taken by our supporters, but critically the impact that our supporters can make. Through providing guidance on how to personalise messages, we can avoid emails being dismissed or reaching spam folders.”
And that has a knock-on effect on the way campaigners feel about taking action.
“The effectiveness is leading to visible progress, and that’s critical in ensuring that subsequent supporters see there’s a point in taking action on the campaign. So, we created the tool in a way that allows them to craft a personal messages about why the CE Bill can deliver a prosperous, nature-rich UK, that benefits nature, jobs and health for all, in their own words — and it will go directly to the right representative.
“We know this has proven fruitful, as we commonly get meaningful responses from MPs which move the campaign forward — they can create an opportunity for further conversation about meeting our shared objectives on climate and nature.”
And WriteToThem helps in other fundamental ways, too:
“It reduces the barrier of users having to search for their MP’s details and contact them in a more manual way. It saves supporters time.
“We knew mySociety was a very reputable and trustworthy organisation that could deliver the reliability we required in providing functional tools to best engage with the political system and felt the tool was a perfect match to get the engagement we were seeking from the campaign. The choice to use WriteToThem has been instrumental in the success of our campaign.”
So would they recommend it to other campaigns looking to follow a similar model?
“Absolutely. We would wholeheartedly recommend campaigns utilise WriteToThem as it’s a reliable and convenient tool for ensuring your campaign is not only seen by a maximum number of representatives but also vitally providing engaged responses.
“We can say without question that the tool increased the frequency of our supporters contacting MPs. This has provided invaluable leverage; opened doors and raising the profile of the CE Bill for us to build support which now stretches across all major parties.”
Indeed, support now comes from 132 MPs, 40 Peers, the Mayor of London, 240 local councils, 192 scientists and 500 organisations — you can find Zero Hour’s full list of supporters here.
“Frequently when we call MPs’ offices about events, briefings and other matters, office staff mention they have received numerous emails on the Climate and Ecology Bill, and that is a testament to the power of the WriteToThem tool, as MP’s have a large number of competing campaigns and prioritises in their inboxes daily. So, if you are looking for a way to easily connect supporters with their MP to increase awareness and engagement on key campaigns, it’s very effective.”
Well, we couldn’t hope for much more than that! We’re very glad to have helped underpin such an essential campaign.
If you’d like to find out more, head to zerohour.uk. And if you feel inspired to write to your MP about the Climate & Ecology Bill, you can do so here.
For those who would like to be kept up to date with all Zero Hour’s activities, the best way is to sign up as a supporter.
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Image: Nuno Vasco Rodrigues / Climate Visuals Countdown (CC by-nc-nd 4.0)
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“Freedom Of Information. Three harmless words.”
The Post Office Horizon scandal serves as a prime example of how, when official channels have failed, determined investigators can eventually unpick the truth and ensure that justice is served.
Horizon, the computerised system on which sub-postmasters were required to balance their tills, was riddled with technical faults that led to inaccurate accounting. These faults could be exacerbated by technicians undertaking remote access without the knowledge of staff, overnight. But incompetence and denials from the top — even as far as government — meant that the blame fell on innocent sub-postmasters.
Justice has been a long time coming. Staff were subject to fines and even unfair imprisonment; families and friendships were destroyed. Years of diversions and cover-ups have now finally come to light, as you may have seen in the extensive media stories.
One person who has been persistent in uncovering the details of the case over the years is Eleanor Shaikh, who has used WhatDoTheyKnow extensively in the pursuit of truth — you can see her requests here.
We asked Eleanor to tell us more about her ongoing work in this area, starting with why she got involved: in response, she pointed us towards a letter on Nick Wallis’ Post Office Scandal website.
It begins: “I learned of the Post Office Horizon scandal through being a regular customer at my local post office in Farncombe, Surrey. My ex-Sub-Postmaster, Chirag Sidhpura, was hit by an alleged £57,000 shortfall in October 2017 and it did not take long to see that his case belonged to a more widespread and disturbing pattern.”
She goes on to explain, “I have seen first hand the silent devastation that this scandal has wrought upon three generations of this decent, hard-working family.” You can read the full letter here.
Findings through FOI
Freedom of Information has been a very effective mechanism for many of those involved in this investigation — a cover-up like this is a perfect demonstration of why we need the rights it confers.
As Eleanor explains, “Over the years, a number of campaigners and journalists have turned to FOI as a tool for obtaining more information and joining the dots of this vast but well-concealed miscarriage of justice. Chipping away at the cover-up was one small way that outsiders could assist Sub-Postmasters on their long road to the truth, exoneration and redress.”
Eleanor’s 150+ requests have led to some significant findings. She started off with a curiosity about how much had been known, but not publicly shared, by government.
“My initial focus was on what government knew of Horizon’s flaws”, she says; “how responsibly it monitored the unfolding scandal, and what was the extent of its involvement in the group litigation.
“The FOI disclosures I received suggested that central government was not as oblivious to events as it would have us believe; the heavy redactions on these reports themselves bore witness to the fear of reputational damage to the department to which the documents alluded.”
As time went on, Eleanor started uncovering more and more salient facts:
“Probably the two most significant documents I’ve been able to unearth have been the 2016 Swift Review and an undated Post Office Security Team Compliance Document.
“The review would seem to have suggested a moment of alignment when both government and the Post Office were committed to investigating Horizon issues beyond all doubt.
“It took seven months to receive a response, but disclosure was made by both parties along with requested email correspondence which showed that the PO’s CEO, Paula Vennells, was aware that the review was being undertaken in 2015 but that the PO Chair, Tim Parker, declined to share its findings with the Post Office Board even as the spectre of litigation loomed in 2016.
“This was despite the review’s strong warnings that miscarriages of justice might have taken place, its clear identification of Horizon’s fundamental operational problems and an acknowledgment of the possibility of remote access.”
These were all crucial details in understanding the full picture, and fed into news coverage of the scandal. There was also something Eleanor hadn’t been specifically looking for that recently made headline news.
While requesting information on the way in which the Post Office monitored its investigations, Eleanor happened across something rather shocking:
“What was disclosed was a document which used deeply offensive racial identification codes, so inflammatory that it attracted widespread media coverage.” You can see, for example, the BBC’s coverage of this revelation here.
“Thanks to the WhatDoTheyKnow website, once it caught the attention of social media, any journalist could get instant access to the original document.”
FOI was necessary
One thing that this investigation highlights is that the checks and balances built into our justice system are sometimes inadequate. The Horizon case was examined in High Court, and has been the subject of two governmental inquiries, one of which is ongoing. But it is citizen reporters using their Right to Information that have filled some of the gaps.
“Despite much crucial information having been released into the public domain during the 2018-19 High Court litigation, many details of the scandal remained hidden”, explains Eleanor.
“The BEIS Select Committee Inquiry, which heard evidence from early 2020, afforded a brief window of opportunity. But its independent work was abandoned soon after it began when the Department for BEIS (now DBT) put in place its own inquiry.
“The Government was adamant that this inquiry would not have statutory powers, meaning it had no authority to command witnesses to give evidence, nor powers to demand the disclosure of documents. Moreover BEIS could keep its own failures of oversight beyond public scrutiny by restricting the scope of the inquiry.
“At this moment there was a very real danger that the true depths and extent of the scandal might never reach public consciousness and that those who’d facilitated the miscarriage of justice may never be identified.
“Ministers and Whitehall officials were attempting to shield themselves from scrutiny and to diffuse an information time-bomb by behaving as if it wasn’t there. But questions needed answers and if the government was refusing to launch a full public inquiry in 2020, then it had to be inquiry by FOI.
WhatDoTheyKnow played a part
We asked Eleanor how integral WhatDoTheyKnow was to her investigation.
“The WhatDoTheyKnow website proved itself to be an invaluable resource. Through its gateway, information and correspondence with authorities is released directly into the public domain in a way which is both transparent and accessible to all; that’s really important in the context of the Horizon scandal.
“Disclosures are easily accessed by others and can be shared on social media. WhatDoTheyKnow has enabled intrepid journalists who follow the scandal — such as Nick Wallis, Karl Flinders and Tony Collins — to extend the reach of any new and significant information.”
A turning point
“Thankfully”, continues Eleanor, “in June 2021 the inquiry was elevated to a statutory footing in response to ground-breaking rulings at the Court of Appeal. This was a turning point and teams of formidable lawyers set to work in supporting Sir Wyn Williams in his long-awaited public inquiry; the Chair now had the power to determine its scope of issues and assumed far greater powers to elicit the disclosure of evidence.
“But there was still a role for FOI research in areas which may lie beyond the inquiry’s remit or which haven’t yet come under its scrutiny.“
And FOI also had another significant, but unexpected outcome:
“One release prompted a review of the Post Office’s entire disclosure processes to the public inquiry. That a key document had never been passed to inquiry lawyers triggered a remedial disclosure exercise so significant that it resulted in the release of thousands more documents and a temporary suspension of the inquiry’s work.
“A single FOI disclosure triggered a wholly unforeseeable domino effect.”
Three harmless words
At the start of all this, Eleanor says, “FOI was an unfamiliar avenue for me.” Since then, she’s clearly become something of an expert, with FOI being a major part of her investigations.
Reflecting on the rights that FOI confers, she says: “There is some irony that the Government which oversaw the launch of the doomed Horizon project in the late 1990s was at the same time drawing up legislation which granted our right to Freedom of Information. It’s poignant too that Tony Blair who decided that the flawed Horizon project must proceed at all costs, was at the same time doing all he could to delay the implementation of the FOI Act.
“In his memoirs, Blair revealed his regret over the decision which gave the public the right to probe the Government’s shortcomings. He feared information would be weaponised by opponents:
‘Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my head till it drops off my shoulders. You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it…What I failed to realise is that we would also have our skeletons rattling around the cupboard…The Freedom of Information Act was then being debated in Cabinet Committee. It represented a quite extraordinary offer by a government to open itself and Parliament to scrutiny. Its consequences would be revolutionary; the power it handed to the tender mercy of the media was gigantic. We did it with care, but without foresight. Politicians are people and scandals will happen’.1
“Thankfully, many individuals have been making full use of FOI to help prise the rattling skeletons of the Horizon scandal from their cupboard. Each disclosure adds to our understanding of how things went so deeply and disastrously wrong. And, as sub-postmasters continue to dig for information across their multiple battle fronts, long may FOI continue to make its small contribution to their uphill struggle for justice.”
Many thanks to Eleanor for sharing this detailed account. You can read her findings on Horizon’s early years in her report Origins of a Disaster.
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Image: Mark Percy (CC by-sa/2.0)
1Quote from Blair’s memoirs Tony Blair The Journey Hutchinson, 2010, cited in an article The Blair Memoirs and FOI, also 2010 by Maurice Frankel, Director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, accessed 10.10.23
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A story in this week’s Financial Times [paywalled] has brought the EPC ratings of council-owned properties into the public conversation. This story was based on data obtained through FOI requests as part of the Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which we’ve been working on in partnership with Climate Emergency UK (CE UK).
What you can read in the FT is one story pulled from a wealth of data, but there’s more to come. Our WhatDoTheyKnow Projects tool allowed CE UK’s team of volunteers to conduct a nationwide survey of every council through well-placed FOI requests covering the use of renewable energy, plans for retrofitting, green skills training, road expansion and more.
The data they gathered has allowed for the understanding of councils’ action on a nationwide scale. This level of oversight has not previously been possible: as with so much about the Scorecards project, it is allowing councils to take more informed action on climate, and individuals to clearly understand what is being done.
Why local action matters
In the UK, it is estimated that around one third of carbon emissions are in some way under the influence of local authorities. 80% of UK councils have declared a ‘climate emergency’ to indicate they recognise the scale of the problem of climate change, and are in a position to take practical steps to be part of the solution. To help local authorities achieve the goals they set themselves (and to push them to go further), we need to engage with the plans that local authorities are making, and the actions they are starting to take.
In 2021, CE UK and mySociety worked together to produce the first Council Climate Plan Scorecards. CE UK’s upcoming launch is the second iteration of the Scorecards. It is much bigger and more ambitious in scope than the last: it scores not the plans, but the climate actions of every local authority in the UK.
FOI requests were just one part of the process. As well as giving CE UK access to WhatDoTheyKnow Projects, we developed a crowdsourcing tool for volunteers to use while marking across the 90+ datapoints collected for each council.
How do you score action?
CE UK moved from scoring plans to scoring actions. That required new approaches to gathering the information.
The questions CEUK used in the new Scorecards are the result of a long and thorough process of research and refinement. Building on their own research and expertise, they conducted one-on-one consultations with approximately 80 organisations and sector-specific experts. An advisory group of environmental and local government experts provided further discussion and refinement, to help build a list of questions that would practically be possible to answer, and that would reveal important information about the climate actions of councils.
The aim was to identify areas where information was publicly accessible; but also where gaps existed, especially in operational matters that aren’t often made public. Additionally, CE UK wanted to investigate whether councils are truly implementing the actions outlined in their climate action plans, including aspects like lobbying for additional powers.
Making use of Freedom of Information
Freedom of Information laws means that a huge range of information held by public authorities (including local councils) can be requested by any person who asks. This provides a legal tool to create greater transparency where information is not being published proactively.
For CE UK, the potential of FOI for the Scorecards project was clear – but there were concerns. In consultations with council staff, there was pushback regarding the use of FOI requests due to the potential time and financial burden on council officers who work on climate – with some requests for a more informal survey approach to be used. But the drawback of that would be making good data dependent on goodwill everywhere. FOI requests provided a way to make sure the scorecards were not just effective for councils who engaged with the process and provide an approach that was fair across the country.
To balance a process where they want to encourage positive engagement from councils, with one that works without that, CE UK’s approach was to plan out the most efficient and least burdensome use of FOI requests.
Based on feedback from the advisory group, and trial runs to a small number of councils, they eliminated questions that were less important and useful, made more ‘yes/no’ or ‘single number’ responses, and learned where certain questions weren’t relevant to certain areas or groups of councils.
The subsequent FOI requests became more streamlined, and this resulted in quicker response times for the final requests than they had in the trial – as the information sought was more direct and concise.
In the end, CE UK submitted a total of over 4,000 FOI requests to councils across the UK. The questions were divided into 11 categories, with some being specific to certain types of councils, such as district councils or combined authorities. The next stage was taking these 4,000 requests and getting them into a form that can be used for the scorecards.
Crowdsourcing and review process
CE UK used WhatDoTheyKnow to manage their FOI request process. mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow acts as a public archive for requests – requests made through the site have the responses shown in public to bring more information into the open – making it more discoverable by other people interested in the information, and reducing the need for duplicate requests being made. As of 2023, a million requests for information have been made through the site, with hundreds of thousands of pieces of information being released.
A feature we are trialling with a range of organisations is WhatDoTheyKnow Projects, which integrates crowdsourcing tools into WhatDoTheyKnow, and allows the task of extracting information into a new dataset to be spread out. The goal is that this helps organisations be more ambitious in finding out information and helps people work together to create genuinely new and exciting datasets, that no single organisation has ever seen.
As CE UK’s approach already made heavy use of volunteers and crowdsourcing, this was a natural fit. Alongside a wider group of 200 volunteers working on getting answers to the other questions, 15 volunteers specifically worked on the FOI requests. These volunteers were a mixture of people with prior experience or professional interest in FOI requests, campaigners well-versed in FOI processes, and individuals new to the concept but eager to engage in activism.
After the crowdsourcing of FOI data was complete, it joined the rest of the data in the new tool mySociety had developed for helping volunteers crowdsource information for the Scorecards.
From here, councils were given access to the data collected about them and given a right of reply to correct any inaccuracies or point towards information not previously discovered or disclosed. The results of this process will then be reviewed to produce the final Scorecards data, which will be launched this month.
But the Scorecards data will not be the only useful thing that will come out of this process. Because of how WhatDoTheyKnow was used, to see evidence supporting the final Scorecards, people will be able to click through and see the original responses, for instance, to see what councils have lobbied on support for their climate work.
Some of the FOIs are being used to construct datasets that have a broader impact, and here we come back to that FT story on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings of council-owned houses. Building these new public datasets will be useful for councils to understand their own situation, and as we see with the news story, more broadly to understand the challenges ahead for local governments to meet net zero emissions goals.
Onwards
The original Scorecards project has already been influential on how local governments understand their own plans, and how organisations like the UK’s Climate Change Committee understand the role and progress of local government in the challenges ahead. When the next generation of Scorecards is released, we hope that they continue to be useful in shaping and improving local government action around climate change.
mySociety believes that digital technology can be used to help people participate more fully in democracy, make governments and societies more transparent, and bring communities together to address societal challenges.
The Scorecards project showcases how the combination of digital tools, people power, and the right to information produces powerful results. We hope that the impact of this project can inspire and make possible similar approaches for other problems, or in other countries.
