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The EIR is a similar set of rights to those we have under Freedom of Information, but specifically give access to environmental information held by public authorities.
Those who remember reading about the sewagemaps project in our blog post of last April will recall that the discharge of sewage falls firmly under the category of environmental information — and may be interested to see an update from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) celebrating an increased an “open by default” culture from the nation’s water companies:
“All of the water companies we wrote to have now committed to proactively publishing information relating to start and stop times of sewage discharges.”
This follows an intervention to water companies from the ICO, reflecting the national mood around sewage discharges, and is a good example of how their regulatory powers can be applied.
“All water companies across the UK have a legal obligation to make information about the environment available under the EIR and are required to both respond to requests for environmental information and to make information available proactively.”
That initial ICO post explained that they had issued six water companies with decision notices requiring them to disclose the start and stop time of sewage discharges, and contacted all 12 CEOs of companies responsible for sewage services to “clearly set out our expectations that [discharge data] should be made available to the public.”
Our own blog post on the sewagemaps.co.uk project has been one of our most read and discussed this year, so we know it’s a topic our followers feel passionate about — a sentiment that’s in line with the nation as a whole. So we were keen to know more, and Deborah Clark at the ICO was happy to oblige.
What was the catalyst for this activity around sewage discharges?
“It was sparked by an increase in complaints we received about water companies and a series of decision notices we issued requiring disclosure of the start and stop time of discharges. This May 2024 document was the first of many decisions where we made our position clear that such information needed to be disclosed.”
Warren Seddon, Director of FOI at the ICO, described the steps you had to take in respect to one particular noncompliant water company — what did that entail?
“We specifically directed United Utilities to proactively publish frequently requested information, which includes historic data on sewage discharges, and to include it in its disclosure log. This was the first Practice Recommendation we have issued under the Code of Practice issued under regulation 16 of the EIR.”
And he also mentioned that you’re working with reluctant companies to show them how to achieve best practice in data publication.
“Yes — we asked the other water and sewage companies to publish the data in the interests of transparency. Here’s the relevant extract from the letters we sent:
In addition to providing timely and appropriate responses to requests for such environmental information, I strongly encourage you to proactively disclose appropriate information relating to sewage discharges on a regular, monthly basis. This proactive and timely publication of the information would not only provide this important information to the public more quickly and easily, but would also be more cost effective and efficient than dealing with the alternative of numerous responses to individual requests for the information.
How much power does the ICO have in this regard?
“This positive change was achieved through engagement rather than formal and specific regulatory action. Water companies are not required by law to publish monthly data.
“We are currently looking at what regulatory activity we can do to better support proactive disclosure provision at Regulation 4 of EIR [“The EIR require authorities to proactively make environmental information that they hold available to the public by electronic means”], but this work is at an early stage — so watch this space.”
Do you have any further advice for people who are frustrated by the sewage discharges they’re seeing in local rivers and beaches? What can they do, or should they be hopeful for change in the future as a result of this increased transparency from the water companies?
“Water companies are a lot more transparent now than they were a few years ago. We will continue to take an interest in this space and we’re involved in an EIR forum for water companies where we encourage proactive publication so this increased transparency should continue.
“At the ICO we’re concerned only with information rights, so that’s where we’re able to give advice; as a start, where possible check publication schemes and disclosure logs for relevant published information before making a request.”
Thanks very much to Deborah for taking the time to talk to us. If you’re interested in obtaining environmental information from public bodies, you should know that you can submit EIRs as well as FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow – there’s more about that here.
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Image: Mark McNeill
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The effects of AI are making themselves known across every sector, and Freedom of Information is no exception.
AI has lowered the bar to making contact, in every place where citizens interact with public authorities, from making pothole reports to submitting FOI requests.
On the face of it, this is a good thing for individuals — after all, mySociety was founded on the principle that digital processes should make it easier for people to interact with government — but this sudden and disruptive uptick in communication has created an increased burden for those authorities*.
At FOI Fest, Scottish FOI Commissioner David Hamilton told us that they’re experiencing unprecedented levels of requests, due to a number of factors, but certainly in part because people are using AI — and as he explained, these requests bring their own specific types of challenges.
Now the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, the ICO, has addressed this new reality by including advice around using AI in their wider guidelines for making an effective request (which also, we’re glad to see, point people towards WhatDoTheyKnow).
What’s the problem?
Generative AI tends to add more complex and unnecessary wording, can provide inaccurate information and will sometimes ‘hallucinate’ (provide inaccurate information). All of these factors mean that authorities are having to spend more time corresponding with request-makers to pin down what they meant to ask for.
While it need not be, FOI can already sometimes be a long process, and this only adds to the time taken (when an authority needs to ask for clarification, it restarts the clock on the 20 working days within which they are required to provide a response).
Plus, if you end up needing to make a complaint about the way your request has been handled, the ICO notes that complex and inaccurate requests make it much harder for them to help you.
What you need to know
The commissioners’ offices are not saying that AI should never be used to write an FOI request or appeal; simply that if you do so, you should proceed with due caution. They suggest:
- Checking that AI hasn’t changed the scope of what you have asked for, and that you are asking for precisely — and only — the information you require.
- Ensuring that your request is clear, concise and focused.
- Checking the facts: don’t assume AI “knows” which law applies or which authority is the suitable recipient for your request.
- Ensuring the tone is appropriate.
In many ways, this is the same advice we’d apply for request-makers who are using their own brains, as well. Either way, it’s always worth getting it right, and making things as easy for yourself, and our public authorities, as possible.
*Although, NB that the jury is still out on whether AI is the direct cause of this: see, for example, this story from Australia.
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Image [amended to include ‘Make an FOI request’ button]: Zulfugar Karimov
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/RSS FeedIn the final session of the day, Carole Ewart, Director at the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland (CFOIS) gave a five-minute rundown of the state of FOI as they are experiencing it.
Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!
Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard]: Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:04 [Carole Ewart]: It’s good to talk to you all today. I’m conscious that people will want to get to the pub, so I have five minutes to be short and snappy.
0:12 My lightning talk is in three parts. First of all, the work that the Campaign For Freedom of Information does with requesters, obviously, because we’ve got small resources, that’s not a huge proportion. As a campaigning organisation, we use FOI, of course, but also as a strategic operator in public policy. (more…)
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Do FOI requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow get better results than those made directly?
Can you make an FOI request via social media?
These and other great questions from the audience were answered by Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for FOI; journalist and FOI expert Martin Rosenbaum; and mySociety’s Gareth Rees & Julia Cushion at FOI Fest.
Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!
Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard]: Welcome to FOI Fest 2026! Let’s start with one online, which is to you, Martin, which is, do you make requests publicly on WhatDoTheyKnow, or mostly private?
0:15 [Martin Rosenbaum]: So I always make my requests privately rather than use WhatDoTheyKnow, because I like to have my own complete personal control over the process.
0:26 I have to say, I do think WhatDoTheyKnow is a wonderful thing. It’s a great resource. I look at it all the time, and it’s very, very useful from the point of view of seeing what requests have been answered already. (more…)
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mySociety’s own Julia Cushion and Gareth Rees talk us through the basic principles of our FOI website WhatDoTheyKnow, and the open codebase that allows others to run similar websites around the world, Alaveteli – all in ten minutes.
If you would prefer to watch this session as a video, you can do so here.
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Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!
Transcript
0:00
[Gavin Freeguard:] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!0:04
[Julia Cushion:] We are from mySociety, makers of WhatDoTheyKnow, but actually wanted to start us today thinking about the code that is behind WhatDoTheyKnow, which we call Alaveteli, and reminding everybody that that is an open source codebase, which means that anybody around the world can run their own Freedom of Information website, and lots of people do. (more…) -
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In this ten minute skills session from FOI Fest, longtime journalist and author of Freedom of Information: A Practical Guidebook Martin Rosenbaum shares his best tips based on usage of the Act that goes back to its implementation.
Martin mentions some of his slides during this talk, and if you’d rather watch than listen, you can do so on YouTube.
Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!
Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:04 [Martin Rosenbaum] Thanks very much. We’ve had a fair amount of advice already about to make effective use of FOI. And what I thought I would do with my two minutes here, as someone who, since the Act came into force in 2005 has made quite a lot of FOI requests, is just give some examples of things that I learnt along the way from particular cases that I was involved in, some which go back more or less, in fact, to 2005 some which are lessons which I learnt quite early on, like perhaps this one. (more…)
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In this ten-minute session from FOI Fest, Chief Executive of the Campaign for Freedom of Information Maurice Frankel explains how to avoid having your requests refused because of the cost limit that is baked into the FOI Act, and what some of the problems with that limit are.
Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!
Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:04 [Maurice Frankel] My first thing to say is not specifically on my topic, but it’s this: if you don’t know anything about the subject, don’t make an FOI request.
0:14 FOI is not the place to start learning about something that you don’t know anything about. If an idea pops into your head, do some research about it. (more…)
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In this panel discussion from FOI Fest, participants discussed the challenges and opportunities for Freedom of Information, including how AI is increasingly a problem – but could also be a solution – for authorities.
You’ll hear from:
- Louise Crow, Chief Executive, mySociety
- Ben Worthy, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Birkbeck College
- Carole Ewart, Director, Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland
- David Hamilton, Scottish Information Commissioner
Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about why and how you listen!
Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:06 [Alex Parsons] So, to split this into two sets of questions. One is around the FOI reform in Scotland, and the other is this ongoing conversation of the day around technology and AI. (more…)
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For the the third in our series of discovery workshops, we invited people working with FOI in public authorities to discuss how a network might support them — and we had more than 50 attendees joining us from a range of organisations and specialities.
Discussion was lively and informative, with many expressing a thirst for community and knowledge-sharing in their roles.
We began with a group brainstorming session to discuss the challenges and obstacles people were facing in their work with FOI.
From this, we pulled out the four major groupings below, so that smaller breakout groups could discuss what attempts had been made previously to mitigate these challenges, how effective these had been, and what an FOI Network could do to help.
Volume/complexity of requests
The increasing volume of FOI requests being received (a challenge which overlaps with that of the lack of resources, below) came up as a common issue, especially in conjunction with the increasing use of AI to generate requests.
Here, there are two concerns: that AI is leading to more complex (if not necessarily more effective) requests; and that there is potential for a deliberate, malicious use of AI-generated FOI requests that might overwhelm an authority without their necessarily being aware of it.
AI-generated/assisted requests are hard to formally recognise (although many are developing a ‘gut feeling’ around them), but also not inherently illegitimate. The group discussed tactics such as asking for clarification or ID, to flush out potentially inauthentic requests if suspected. A participant from the ICO also shared their recent AI guidance.
What could an FOI Network contribute here? Convening people was seen as useful in helping to understand patterns and themes between authorities, and shared approaches. This might take the form of directly organised networking activity, or supporting and promoting the informal networks that already exist.
Building centralised resources might also help in creating tools for assessing thresholds of vexatiousness, while also providing better assistance to requesters on what good and bad degrees of complexity looks like in an FOI request.
Locating information
Finding the information that is being requested is at the very heart of what an FOI officer does — and can present a sizable challenge, especially where data is not collected or stored consistently.
Discussion touched on issues around record keeping, proactive publication, resource and support from colleagues in sourcing/collecting information: while the officer is the entry point for requests for information, they most likely hold little of it themselves.
The amount of resource, support and priority is given to record keeping and FOI across the organisation affects how effective an officer can be.
Information can only be easily accessed if it is stored well: some participants talked about requests for data that is not currently centrally held, but which requesters argue should be, leading to antagonistic interactions, despite the Information Officer not being to blame.
Participants talked both about resourcing conflicts where other priorities were legitimately higher (eg “The information holders are clinical staff (NHS) and trying to get them to answer FOI requests when they are busy with patients is not reasonable”); but also situations where requests not taken seriously by senior teams, or other departments were slow to engage with them.
As such, a key challenge for information officers is navigating both the formal and relational structures of their organisation, and a key challenge for an FOI Network is finding ways to support this role in developing a culture of transparency and good record keeping practice.
Part of this fits with our theory that good FOI statistics are an important factor in empowering information officers — because this visibility would make FOI performance between organisations more salient, and so a greater concern for senior decision-makers.
Lack of resources
This group discussed the lack of resources, staffing and slashed funding — including elsewhere in the organisation, where diminished budgets can remove the institutional knowledge and capacity to effectively find information.
This was another area where there was great enthusiasm for better connections between officers across organisations, especially for the small, isolated teams. This would allow all to benefit from the knowledge of a wider group.
For a longer-term fix to the lack of resources, a united network could lobby to central government. This isn’t just about “more money”, but the effective production of centralised resources that would help everyone (eg software, tools and licences).
It was noted that redaction was a problem that was significantly time consuming, and available redaction tools (like Adobe Pro) were expensive and had limited licences.
Proactive publication was also identified as a resourcing issue: in repeated requests for hot topics; but also in that publishing information can lead to more requests asking for specifics.
From our point of view running WhatDoTheyKnow, this should still mean a greater public benefit from the information provided (people who wouldn’t ask for it have access to it), but does caution against an easy “publish more, request numbers decrease” approach — which does not align with the experience of practitioners.
Working with requesters
This group discussed complaints resulting from a requester not knowing how to navigate the FOI system or complaints processes, and thoughts on more effective communication. A lack of requester awareness that the FOI route is not the same as the complaint route was identified, as well as public confusion between FOI and data subject rights.
There is recognition that the requester doesn’t always know what information is available, which can lead to complex initial requests. But there was also a reported increase in adversarial/angry complaints, with a perception from request-makers that information was being denied when in didn’t exist. Where people are making requests across multiple authorities, getting refusals from some but not from others, can lead to this impression, while actually just reflecting differences in what data is collected.
Better information and signposting about how to make a good FOI request was considered helpful, but within limits. Improved web forms can be helpful, but are not the only route in. At the same time, from a volume and overload point of view, a concern that greater awareness of the act might lead to more requests. This makes it important to define what we’re after as a network that can reconcile both a civil society “it’s good if more people are aware of and use their rights” with the practicalities of make that right real, which includes understanding of capacity.
In general, a lot of the potential in this area is around helping those making, and those answering requests to understand each other, or at least understanding more about how things work behind the scenes.
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Finally, there was a more general discussion about forms a network can take, including the difficulty of convening both requesters and practitioners. Creating spaces for authority-side practitioners to talk helps with the smooth functioning of the FOI Act; these spaces would be more hesitant if always shared with civil society groups (and vice versa).
We want to find ways to bridge these groups, while recognising that both individually can be constructive. We need a set of layered discussions about how to make FOI work in practice, that can manage both communities of practice, also bridging both sides — recognising where common frustrations and collective goals can be served through better communication and coordination. This is inherently going to be complex, but will be so worthwhile to explore.
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Illustration: Alghozy
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In the second keynote from FOI Fest, David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner, explained current challenges, including the arrival of the AI-based request, increased levels of anger on both sides, and what it means when FOI is front page news every three days. He also goes through the forthcoming changes that the Reform Bill is set to bring to Freedom of Information in Scotland.
David refers to his slides a few times during this recording. If you would prefer to watch this presentation as a video, head over to YouTube.
Please fill in our short survey to help us understand more about our listeners!
Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard:] Welcome to FOI Fest, 2026
0:04 [David Hamilton] I’m David Hamilton. I’m the Scottish Information Commissioner.
0:07 I don’t know. I always end up speaking at conferences on FOI in England after Scotland thump England at rugby. So having alienated most of the audience, let me carry on. (more…)
