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Submitting evidence to Parliamentary inquiries is one of the ways in which we can have an effect on the way things work in this country.
As you may recall, we recently contributed to the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee on Freedom of Information reform, and now we’ve submitted written evidence to the UK Procedure Committee’s inquiry on Written Questions.
This time, we’re making the case for more alignment between FOI requests and Parliament’s Written Questions system. Written Questions are a mechanism by which MPs and Lords can hold Ministers to account, in much the same way that the public can request information from government authorities through FOI.
We have recommended that a rejected parliamentary question should be retrospectively converted to an FOI request to allow making an appeal; and that given the influence of FOI in Parliament (both by parliamentarians, and in how they use FOI requests made by others), government statistics on FOI effectiveness should be scrutinised alongside Written Question statistics.
Finally, reflecting one of the findings in our WhoFundsThem work, we think that when a Member submits a Written Question and declares an interest, they should be required to say what that interest is.
For much more detail on each of these points, you can see our submission on the Parliament website.
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WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, our Freedom of Information service for users such as journalists, researchers and campaigners, now comes with Projects bundled in at no extra cost. That means that, as well as sending batch requests more easily, you can also bring in colleagues or volunteers to help you refine and analyse the data you receive in response.
How WhatDoTheyKnow Pro can help you
WhatDoTheyKnow Pro is a useful tool for those sending the same FOI request to multiple authorities: what we call ‘batch requesting’. Often, when embarking on an investigation, or gathering data for research or to inform a campaign, it’s helpful to gather data from many sources to create a full picture.
For example, in this recent blog post, Zarino described how he used Pro to ask every local authority in the UK how many safeguarding referrals they had received from schools that they manage. Climate Emergency UK have also used Pro to good effect, gathering data about councils’ climate action that wasn’t otherwise publicly available.
WhatDoTheyKnow Pro helps with two of the more difficult elements of bulk requesting:
- finding/compiling a list of all the relevant authorities’ email addresses; and
- keeping track of which authorities have responded, and which need following up.
What Projects adds
Now, the inclusion of Projects eases another big challenge of bulk requesting: sorting through the masses of responses to pull out the information you need.
Even when you frame your request to ask for data in a certain format, as permitted by the FOI Act, experience suggests that you’ll rarely receive responses that fit neatly into a spreadsheet for your instant analysis.
As Zarino noted in his follow-up post on requesting safeguarding data, much depends on how the authority are storing the information at their end: “We think, in reality, very few of the authorities held this data in a format structured enough to count as a ‘dataset’, but a few did send over their data in spreadsheet format, which was nice to see! Others, however, sent us tables in Word documents, in PDFs, SharePoint links, even ASCII-art tables in raw email text.”
These days, AI might be helpful with some data-refining tasks; but as we discovered with our WhoFundsThem project recently, sometimes humans are the best bet for combing through responses and pulling out the parts you need, in the format you need. Climate Emergency also took the time to train large cohorts of volunteers to ensure the assessments they were pulling out of their FOI responses for the Council Climate Action Scorecards were fair and accurate. Both projects made good use of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro and Projects.
What can Projects do for you?
If you have one or more associate working with you, or if you can assemble a team of willing volunteers, you can share the work of going through the FOI responses as they come in. Projects makes collaboration easy.
You can use Projects to give your team an online interface where you describe the aims of your investigation, and set out the questions you need answers to. Your helpers will then go through each response in turn and identify the parts you need, putting them into your standardised format. At the end, all their inputs are pulled into a nice, tidy spreadsheet that allows you to do the analysis you need.
Contributors don’t need a Pro membership themselves, so there’s no extra cost to you, and the only extra effort required is in setting out what data it is that you need to pull out from the responses — something it’s useful to have straight anyway!
No team to help you? Projects can also be used solo, and still helps you keep track of the information you’re pulling out — helpful if there are lots of data points.
Subscribe to WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (with Projects included), or see the Help page for more detail.
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Image: Kylie Haulk
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/RSS FeedA behind-the-scenes look at how Fiquem Sabendo uses Brazil’s FOI law to unlock data and support investigative journalism.
Maria Vitória Ramos, Co-founder and Director of Fiquem Sabendo, shares how the organisation prepares requests, processes government data, and supports journalists in turning information into impactful reporting.
Fiquem Sabendo is a non-profit newsroom and data agency that uses Brazil’s access to information law to uncover and share government data with journalists and the public. Since its founding, the team has released over a thousand new public datasets and trained thousands of journalists and citizens to make effective FOI requests. They also publish the popular newsletter Don’t LAI to Me, bringing transparency stories to a wide audience.
If you find this podcast valuable, please consider donating to help us keep making them.
Music: Serge Pavkin Music (Pixabay licence)
Transcript
0:00 Julia: We are joined by the wonderful Maria Vitória Ramos from Fiquem Sabendo in Brazil. Some of you may already know her from her fantastic presentation at TICTeC in London in 2024: I think it was a highlight for lots of people, including myself.
0:12 If you haven’t come across their work before, Fiquem Sabendo is a nonprofit newsroom and data agency that uses Brazil’s Freedom of Information laws to unlock public data and make it useful for journalists, civil society organisations and the public.
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Discover how three organisations are using crowdsourcing and Access to Information laws to uncover data, monitor public projects, and drive accountability.
Access to Information (ATI) is the more internationally-recognised term for FOI or FOIA. Its laws make it possible to piece together insights from many different public authorities, creating a fuller picture of how decisions are made and resources are used.
This session explores how ATI empowers communities, volunteers, and civil society groups to use information requests to assemble datasets, track public projects, and enhance accountability through collective inquiry.
Hear from three projects that have turned transparency into a community effort with fantastic results! We’ve got fantastic speakers from across the globe:
- Nnenna Eze from PPDC Nigeria
- Marzena Błaszczyk from Citizens Network Watchdog Poland
- Stefan Wehrmeyer from FragDenStaat in Germany
Definitions:
- MDA – Ministries, Departments, and Agencies
- DEX – Digital Employee Experience
Credits:
Music by HigherUniversalMan, Pixabay free usage licence.
Transcript:
0:00 Julia: Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s webinar, which is Networked auditors: crowdsourcing and community-led ATI.
0:06 My name is Julia Cushion. I’m the Policy and Advocacy Manager here at mySociety, and I’m really delighted to welcome you to this session, which is part of our Access to Information Community of Practice. (more…)
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The government is making a significant investment into AI in public services, and systems are changing apace.
AI is increasingly being deployed in every department of government, both national and local, and often through systems procured from external contractors.
In a recent article for Public Technology, mySociety’s Chief Executive Louise Crow flags that we urgently need to update our transparency and accountability mechanisms to keep pace with the automation of state decision-making.
This rapid adoption needs scrutiny: not only because significant amounts of money are being spent; but also because we’re looking at a new generation of digital systems in which the rules of operation are, by their very nature, opaque.
To see Louise’s thoughts on what needs to change, and why, as this new technological era unfolds, read the full piece here.
If you find it of interest, you may also wish to watch this recent event at the Institute for Government, The Freedom of Information Act at 25, where Louise was one of six speakers reflecting on the future of transparency in the UK.
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Image: Alex Socra
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Mayoral expenses are a big topic in France just now, in a moment that’s reminiscent of our own MPs’ expenses scandal back in 2009.
Chandeliers, luxury TVs and a duck house
The UK’s Freedom of Information Act had only recently come into force when investigative reporter Heather Brooke lodged a request for details of MPs’ expenses. The ins and outs make for a long — and interesting — story, but suffice to say that, with the nation gripped, this may have been the moment when FOI entered the public consciousness.
When the expenses information finally went public, it caused widespread outrage, and had a long-lasting effect on the nation’s trust in politicians. Today, the scandal is perhaps most often remembered for an MP’s infamous duck house, but the overreach in what had been claimed seemed endless, with payments for chandeliers, swimming pool heaters and luxury TVs all being recompensed.
mySociety was part of the successful campaign to head off a subsequent attempt from MPs to have their expenses made exempt from FOI. Fortunately that idea was quashed. There’s still a need for scrutiny, though:16 years later with our WhoFundsThem project, we continue to push for better transparency and adherence to the rules around MPs’ sources of income.
Designer clothing, false eyelashes and a rabbit-shaped pizza
Meanwhile, over in France, expenses are very much in the news. In their case, it’s mayoral use of public funds that has whipped up a frenzy, with FOI requests lodged on the French Alaveteli site MaDada providing the relevant documents.
Le Parisien covered the story (in French, of course — but Google Translate is handy) and also put out a video (again, if your French isn’t up to scratch, use the translated subtitles): at the time of writing it’s been watched almost 200K times.
In short, Freedom of Information is helping to reveal which mayors have used the occupational expense account to pay for lavish dinners and designer clothing (as well as, quite the detail, a ‘pizza in the shape of a rabbit’) and which have confined themselves to more essential or modest job-related purchases such as train tickets and rainwear for protection when cycling between meetings.
But at the same time, the video shows a citizen being pleasantly surprised by his mayor’s lack of profligacy — FOI can reveal laudable behaviour as well as misconduct.
Putting FOI into the public consciousness
The story has grown over time. MaDada has many requests about public officials’ expenses, dating back quite a few years. The topic hit TikTok — one mayor’s expenses included false eyelashes, cashmere sweaters, and apparently…fossils for her mother — and then the mainstream news.
In Le Parisien’s video, MaDada’s co-founder Laurent Savaëte explains that this public conversation has brought peaks in usage to the site, proving the throughline from a news story to an increased societal interest in accessing information.
We admired the video’s clear explanation of the timeline of a response, and what happens if an authority refuses to provide the information requested: all useful intel for beginner request-makers.
And the coverage continues, with France’s second-biggest regional paper delving into the contents of MaDada (and requesting documents where they weren’t to be found) for a story just this week.
With this level of detail in the mainstream news, as with MaDada’s request for the president’s payslip, the story is quietly introducing to the French public, perhaps even normalising, the act of making FOI requests. Or perhaps we mean the act of demanding transparency from our representatives. Either way, it’s all good stuff.
An international concern
Transparency around representatives’ expenditure is of importance everywhere, and a natural fit for FOI. A recent analysis of news stories generated from information requested across all Alaveteli sites brought up similar questions in Ukraine (where the mayor of Odessa is raising his own salary), Moldova (where people are wondering why a friend was contracted to make repairs to the mayor’s office) and Croatia (where funds designated for road repairs that do not appear to have been made are being scrutinised).
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Image: Bartjan (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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In our latest online webinar, we convened three experts to tell us about how Freedom of Information works in practice – in other words, how does the law work when it comes into contact with the real world?
You can rewatch the video on our YouTube channel.
Speakers were:
Toby Mendel, founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, who have run the Right To Information rating since 2011. This makes it easy to see at a glance which countries are performing well across a number of different indicators around transparency and FOI, and which not so well.
Toby explains how a ranking can have interesting effects – not least encouraging countries to compete against near neighbours to do a little better! For us, of course, it’s interesting to see this in the light of the Council Climate Action Scorecards, where this race to the top is also one of the positive outcomes.
Giovanni Esposito from the Université Libre de Bruxelles described a set of field experiments he conducted in collaboration with the Belgian Alaveteli site Transparencia.be, to see what factors make a difference to responsiveness when putting in a request for information. This involved asking for the same document from several different municipalities – and you can find out the results by watching the video.
Then finally, Mária Žuffová of the European University Institute shared her research into what the UK public actually want to know, based on analysis of WhatDoTheyKnow requests – as one might imagine, this was of great interest to all of us here at mySociety, as it will be to everyone with a curiosity about humankind!
Enjoyed this?
We’ve put on a lot of online webinars and events recently, all with the aim of sharing knowledge among our global networks of civic tech organisations, and beyond to anyone who has an interest in our topics of democracy, transparency, climate and community. If you’d like to be kept informed about upcoming webinars, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to check the box marked ‘conferences and events’ (or just tick the topics you are most interested in, and then we’ll let you know everything we’re doing in those areas, including events).
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Did you know that Home Office data doesn’t include the reason that individuals have been taken to immigrant detention centres? Or that the UK is the only country in Europe with no limit on how long they can hold someone in such facilities?
One organisation keeping a careful eye on the situation is Spanish investigative journalism and fact-checking foundation Maldita, whose recent series of articles (in collaboration with Romanian organisation Funky Citizens) also reveals that the detention of Europeans is at its highest level since Brexit, with Romanian, Polish and Lithuanian citizens most represented.
Maldita’s project is replete with the stories of those detained in the UK; insights from organisations concerned with migration and data retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to UK authorities — new ones, and ones they discovered in the vast archive of public responses available on our FOI site WhatDoTheyKnow.
Reading the set of four pieces, it becomes clear that much of the data required to understand the wider picture is either not collected, or has only come into the open thanks to the public’s right to information.
Happily, when it comes to information from UK authorities, this right is available to those outside the country (despite a threat to this, back in 2020), giving a higher chance that data impossible to source from one end of the equation may be retrieved from the other.
Mentorship
We came to work with Maldita thanks to the Journalismfund mentoring programme, through which we offered support and guidance based on our experience around FOI and supporting cross-border investigations (see, for example, the Lost In Europe project). We were happy to provide expertise on navigating the UK’s FOI system, and making introductions to other organisations that would be of help.
The resulting articles present sobering facts about the quantity and length of detainments, as well as health issues and self harm among detainees. Until reading these, you may not be aware that the UK is the only country where no date has to be given for release — and, as one might imagine, this results in poor mental health among many.
Investigative journalist Coral García Dorado, Coordinator of Disinformation Investigations for Maldita, told us how our interventions had facilitated their project.
During the time we worked together, we introduced Maldita to our WhatDoTheyKnow platform and mentored them around the best way of writing FOI requests. “You can’t imagine how important this tool was for us”, says Coral. “It’s something we don’t have in Spain”*.
An invaluable archive
Perhaps Coral’s greatest discovery was around how useful a vast archive of existing requests can be. This helped in three ways:
→ They came across data that had already been requested, and used it in their pieces:
“It’s very valuable,” noted Coral, “because sometimes you would just be asking for the same information that others had — and if you put in the request yourself, you’d have to wait some time for them to send you the information. So if someone has already asked for it and the information is there, you don’t have to replicate the same job again.”
She gave two examples of where they used this approach: “We published incidents of self harm in detention centres. It was requested by one person, and we just picked it up from there.“And also thanks to someone who requested it on your tool, we know what the longest amount of time is that someone has been held an immigration removal centre: 1,131 days“. You can see how both of these requests fed into the work in this article.
→ Where a request would have been useful, but was several years old, they replicated it
“We made a request to the NHS because we saw another person’s one. It’s very useful because maybe you don’t know that this information exists, so you don’t know that this information can be provided, and once you see that, you can use the precise same wording to ask them to send you the updated information.”
→ They discovered new ideas to explore
Coral explained that searching the archive using keywords around immigration “gives you an idea of what you can get”
Different countries, different access
Maldita encountered frustrations around getting information from the Spanish authorities — it turned out that getting it from the UK side was more fruitful.
“We asked [the Spanish authorities] for information about Spanish people detained in the UK, but in the end, we couldn’t get it – they gave us information about Spanish people in prison,” explained Coral.
“They didn’t have — or at least they said they didn’t have — information about the number of Spanish citizens detained in an immigration removal centre. But then if we go back to some articles published by all the newspapers, for example, El País in 2021, someone from the government said, ‘We know, at the moment of nine people who entered an immigration removal centre this year’.
“So they had this information, but they said they don’t record this kind of information! In the end, we struggled a lot getting information from the Spanish authorities.”
Other challenges
This kind of setback can be dispiriting, but it surely helps to share one’s woes with others who can precisely understand them. In the course of their investigations, Maldita spoke to a number of organisations.
One of these was the Oxford Immigration Observatory, who explained ongoing frustrations around the cohesiveness of data between centres — making it impossible to track detainees if they were moved from one place to another. In turn, this of course makes it more difficult to pin down precise numbers.
All worthwhile
Finally, we asked Coral how the investigation has been received. “It did have impact – I have to say most of all in the UK, from the different organisations helping migrants.”
She added, “It’s been great working with you, and having access to the tool. So thank you so much.”
We return the thanks — it is always a pleasure to facilitate a vital piece of investigative journalism.
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* In fact, Spain did once have its own functioning Alaveteli site, which closed in the face of challenges around the government’s reluctance to adhere to the spirit of their own Access to Information law.
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Image: Schumi4ever (CC by-sa/4.0)
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Often, responses published on our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow result in newspaper stories, or feed into campaigns or research.
When this happens with one of your own requests, you can add a link to the page. These then appear in the side column, like this:
It’s a great way for other users of the site to see the direct results that come from the simple act of making an FOI request — and now we’ve also added an ‘FOI in Action’ page, where you can see all of them in one place.
Here are five stories that have caught our eye from that page:
- A request for all communications around Eric Trump’s March 2025 visit to Edinburgh allowed the public to see the briefings made to the First Minister of Scotland ahead of their meeting — and resulted in this national news story.
- Minutes from the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Unregistered Marriages, acquired via this request, fed into a chapter of research on many aspects of modern marriage, this one being on unregistered Muslim marriages.
- All evidence points to this response being the basis for the New York Times piece [paywalled] that broke the massive story of the government’s £2.4 million expenditure to hide a life-or-death data breach, concerning Afghans who worked with the British forces.
- A 2022 report into misogyny in the British Army was not released until requested and then pursued via the user’s right to an internal review. The user knew of its existence thanks to previous news stories referring to it. The Byline Times reveals the report’s shocking findings in this news story.
- This 2019 report from The Bureau of Investigation looked into public sector adoption of algorithmic and data-driven systems, presciently foreseeing the explosive adoption of AI in our public services. This was based on several requests from a single user.
We’re not far off listing 3,000 citations on WhatDoTheyKnow — and these are just the ones users have added. If your request resulted in a piece of journalism, informed a campaign or fed into research, do add it in. As well as helping to show others what FOI can do, it provides a significant link back to the external site, helping bring it more readers.
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Image: Peter Lawrence
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AI and automated decision-making technologies are increasingly being used in government, and due to their opaque nature, it’s vital that we bring more transparency to their workings. In this event, three researchers and civil society actors talk about how they have used Freedom of Information to do just that.
You’ll hear from Morgan Currie from the University of Edinburgh; Gabriel Geiger of Lighthouse Reports, and Jake Hurfurt from Big Brother Watch. Learn what concerns them about this new age of automated decision-making; the practical tips and techniques they’ve used to bring hidden algorithms to light; and what needs to change in our laws as a matter of urgency.
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More information
- Blog post, with links to the video and slides
- Morgan Currie’s research (with Alli Spring): Algorithmic Transparency in the UK
- Lighthouse Reports’ Suspicion Machines, as presented by Gabriel Geiger
- Big Brother Watch’s report on the ‘error-riddled AI tool to be used by the Home Office’.
- Find out more about the Access to Information Network
Transcript
Louise Crow 0:03
Hello, everyone, welcome. I’m Louise Crow, Chief Executive mySociety.Louise Crow 0:08
Thank you for joining us for this one hour session on how Access to Information can help us understand AI decision making in government. (more…)
