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

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)

This year, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW).

We wanted to see whether we could replicate a successful model that we’ve already established in our work with The Climate Coalition, building the Local Intelligence Hub – we had an idea that the same approach could benefit coalitions of other types, and this was a chance to put that to the test with EVAW’s network of 160+ service delivery, campaigning, and advocacy organisations.

EVAW very kindly invited us into their office last Spring, where we showed them how mySociety’s tools (including WhatDoTheyKnow and TheyWorkForYou, as well as the Local Intelligence Hub) are already being used by citizens, campaigners and activists to engage with elected decision-makers. We then had a chance to talk about how EVAW and their members use—and could use—data as part of their work.

On a personal level, after having been steeped in the climate and nature sector over the last few years, it was fascinating to see how different the data landscape is in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector.

A lack of data in the VAWG sector

For example, it looks like sensitivity around personal data and the safety of individuals accessing support services is having a knock-on effect on what data is publicly available. To an outside analyst trying to get a top-level picture, it’s hard to see what’s happening on VAWG at a local level.

Protecting the safety of victims and service users is obviously paramount. But these laudable protections seem to extend into a broader, less necessary ringfencing, with little transparency about spending on VAWG and the provision of services, for example.

This creates a challenge not only for the campaigners and services looking to tell a local story to bring about more commitments to addressing VAWG, but also the public bodies trying to monitor and tackle VAWG across the country.

We’re interested to see how a website modelled on our Local Intelligence Hub could help here, by bringing together safe, already public data, into a single place, so that it can inform more constructive conversations with and between public bodies.

This work is also timely given that the government has committed to halve VAWG in a decade, with only limited information about how it intends to measure its progress.

Sharing data already collected by authorities

Another approach we’ve taken to this deficit of data is by using Freedom of Information (FOI). Everyone in the UK has a right to request information held by any government or public body, and over our many years of running the FOI website WhatDoTheyKnow, we’ve seen lots of examples of how people have used this right to highlight and campaign around all sorts of social causes in the UK – from contaminated blood, to modern slavery, to disability rights.

This Summer, with EVAW, we’ve been investigating how we could use FOI to open up better data on the handling of safeguarding concerns in schools.

EVAW research has shown that schools are a critical site for tackling violence against young people, and especially girls. And yet much of the data that would help them track the scale of VAWG in schools is either collected by schools or local authorities but not then published, or published but in subtly incompatible ways between the four separate countries of the UK.

And so we’ve used WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch and projects features to send FOI requests to every local authority in the UK.

We’ve asked how many safeguarding referrals they receive from the schools they manage. While we’re still processing the responses, the disparity of data (and data unavailability) between different authorities in different areas is eye-opening. Not to mention the variety of formats we’ve received data in – plain text, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSVs… it’ll be fun extracting data out of them all!

Our aim is that, through experiments like this, we can build a replicable pipeline to feed more data from public authorities’ internal records, through FOI requests, into a tool modelled on the Local Intelligence Hub, for activists, VAWG services, elected representatives, and the wider public to benefit from.

Header image: Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, attends the Women’s Aid 50th anniversary conference in 2024. Photo by Andy Taylor – Home Office, CC BY 2.0.

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).

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)

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

We launched WhatDoTheyKnow with two goals: to make Freedom of Information more accessible to all; and to provide a free public archive of all the information that is released as a result. Today, 17 years later, those goals still guide us, and there’s more we can do towards them every day.

Most recently, we’ve developed a couple of features: a series of guides that aim to help newbies take the first steps into Freedom of Information; and a new way of browsing to make it easier to find what you need within the huge and ever-growing archive of information on the site.

FOI 101

We here at mySociety might talk about FOI all the time, but we know that to much of the population, the concept is vague, maybe daunting, and often riddled with misconceptions. To try and address this, we recently launched our Learn pages, which provide simple guidance to anyone taking their first steps into using the Act. 

Beginners — or anyone who needs a refresher — can follow these very simple instruction pages, and in no time will be using FOI to request information that can strengthen the power of campaigns, inform the public conversation or simply satisfy their own curiosity.

Browse by category

Our second addition is a new way to browse the closing-in-on 1.25 million public requests on WhatDoTheyKnow.

Even with clear guidance, it can be hard to pin down wording for that first request, so If you’d like some examples of how others have done it (or inspiration on the types of things you can ask), you can head to the ‘browse by category‘ page, where we’ve started to group examples of requests by topic. 

At the moment, these are heavy on topics relating to the environment, as this interface was conceived by our Climate team to feed into the Scorecards project — however, there are other categories too, and more to come.

So, whether you’re interested in information around cinema, radio and television; historic eras; railways; past exam papers; flood defences or a wealth of other topics, there is plenty of inspiration to be had there.

WhatDoTheyKnow was launched in 2008. 

We’re still working hard to increase transparency, in the UK and around the world

In this era of misinformation, the value of factual data, straight from the source, increases every day. Donate here and help ensure that we continue to provide the services that make Freedom of Information available to everyone, here in the UK and in the 30 sites around the world built on our free, open source software.

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Image: Gabriella Clare Marino

If you were one of the 100+ people who joined us for today’s webinar, you’ll already know it was hugely informative and timely.

We packed three fascinating speakers into the course of one hour-long session on using FOI to understand AI-based decision making by public authorities. Each brought so many insights that, even if you were there, you may wish to watch it all over again.

Fortunately, you can! We’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, and you can also access Morgan’s slides on Google Slides, here and Jake’s as a PDF, here (Jake actually wasn’t able to display his slides, so this gives you the chance to view them alongside his presentation, should you wish).

Morgan Currie of the University of Edinburgh kicked things off with a look at her research ‘Algorithmic Accountability in the UK’, and especially how opaque the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)’s use of automation for fraud detection has been, over the years.

Morgan explains the techniques used to gain more scrutiny of these decision-making and risk assessment processes, with much of the research based on analysing FOI requests made by others on WhatDoTheyKnow, which of course are public for everyone to see.

Secondly, in a pre-recorded session, Gabriel Geiger from Lighthouse Reports gave an overview of their Suspicion Machines Investigation which delves into the use of AI across different European welfare systems. Shockingly, but sadly not surprisingly, the investigation found code that was predicting which recipients of benefits are most likely to be committing fraud, with an inbuilt bias against minoritised people, women and parents — multiplied for anyone who falls into more than one of those categories.

Gabriel also outlined a useful three-tiered approach to this type of investigation, which others will be able to learn from when instigating similar research projects.

Our third speaker was Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch, who spoke of the decreasing transparency of our public bodies when it comes to AI-based systems, and the root causes of it: a lack of technical expertise among smaller authorities and the contracting of technology from private suppliers. Jake was in equal parts eloquent and fear-inducing about what this means for individuals who want to understand the decisions that have been made about them, and hold authorities accountable — but he also has concrete suggestions as to how the law must be reformed to reflect the times we live in.

The session rounded off with a brief opportunity to ask questions, which you can also watch in the video.

Presented in collaboration with our fellow transparency organisations AccessInfo Europe and Frag Den Staat, this session was an output of the ATI Community of Practice.

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Image: Michael Dziedzic

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen public debate and campaigning around the government’s proposed cuts to PIP — benefits that are intended to ease the additional costs of living that come with being disabled. 

The Bill was voted through, but only once it was agreed that the proposed changes to PIP eligibility would be paused until after a ministerial review involving disabled people has taken place. This concession was the result of MPs threatening to rebel.

With the objections coming from within the Labour party itself, it would be easy to think that the entire discussion was happening between MPs. In fact, when MPs vote with their conscience, their stance has often been partially informed by lobbying from their constituents and from campaign groups with a particular interest in the outcome.

Freedom of Information can be an excellent resource for this sort of lobbying: it provides incontrovertible facts, sometimes from the very authorities being petitioned. 

We’ve recently seen how FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow have helped create news stories that inform opinions around PIP. 

For example, Learning Disability Today published an article in April, casting light on how many current claimants would have lost out if the government had, as they originally planned, removed the daily living component from claimants scoring less than 4 points for at least one activity. They say that their FOI request to the Department of Work and Pensions “revealed much higher numbers than previously suggested”, resulting in “almost nine out of ten current standard daily living awards failing on renewal”.

And Rightsnet has the stats on the number of PIP decisions reversed before going to appeal, alongside the medical conditions where this has happened most and least often — a useful benchmark for those considering an appeal, but such stats are also frequently used to point out the inadequacy of the system.

As the matter is not yet settled, and given the requirement for a ministerial review that involves disabled people, we expect to see many more relevant FOI requests in the near future.

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Image: Roger Blackwell CC by/2.0

Transparency is always a strong theme at TICTeC, and since so many members of the Access to Information Network were in town for the conference, we thought we’d take the opportunity to meet up. 

And so, the day after, several people who run Freedom of Information sites came together in an airy attic room to share knowledge and discuss challenges. 

As always when we convene this specialised interest group, participants were delighted to have in-depth discussions to other people who fully ‘get it’ — to whom the challenges of running such sites are not just academic, but form part of their day to day realities.

Sitting around the tables were Stefan and Luisa of Frag den Staat (Germany); Michael from CoST (Uganda); Ana from ForSet (Georgia); Miguel from Plaza Civica (Peru); Liset and Tim from SPOON (Netherlands); Krisztina from Átlátszónet Foundation (Hungary); Martin from Abrimos (Mexico); Rachel from AccessInfo (Europe); Michal, Piotr and Marzena from Citizens’ Network Watchdog (Poland); Laurent from MaDada (France); Maria from Fiquem Sabendo (Brazil); Matt from the Civic Tech Field Guide and Julia, Louise and me representing mySociety.

Positive wins 

We began by sharing recent successes. A few of the organisations were successful in overturning governmental attacks on, or restrictions to, FOI rights, while others had used research and activism to undermine negative perceptions around the Right To Know. We heard of successful campaigns and grant bids too — overall, sharing these wins was a great way to kick things off.

Learning new skills 

Ana gave a really insightful presentation on how ForSet had worked with ‘influencers’ to reach a new audience. Here, the term ‘influencer’ really just meant content creators with a wide following among the Gen Z audience they were trying to appeal to. 

For context, in Georgia young people have been out on the streets en masse, successfully protesting against proposed laws. Even if they weren’t yet old enough to vote, Ana pointed out, they could still influence public discourse and the political agenda. 

And now, as that generation reaches voting age, ForSet wanted to use social media platforms to encourage democratic participation.

As with everything the organisation does, the level of preparation and analysis that they brought to the project was outstanding, making sure that they fully understood who Gen Z would pay attention to, and trying out different messages to see what worked. There was so much to learn here about how to break into new audiences and how to ensure that what you were doing had an effect.

A forest of trees

Next, Rachel led us in an exercise to plot the challenges we face running ATI sites onto a tree diagram – with causes at the roots, core issues on the trunk, and consequences in the leafy canopy.  

What we discovered was first, that challenges and problems tend to be the same in every context; and second, that causes and effects are so interlinked that it is often difficult to decide which is which. For example, a lack of public understanding around ATI can both cause a low usage, and be the result of inadequate education around the topic. Authorities’ low response rates might be the result of poor governmental oversight, or the cause of public apathy – and so on.

Batch and back-ups

In the afternoon, the topics were decided upon by consensus: we had a useful conversation about the issues around batch requesting (sending the same request to multiple authorities), which sites offer in a variety of different ways ranging from it being open to most users, to being available only to staff (and some don’t offer it at all).  

Secondly, we discussed ‘backing up’ – both backups to ensure our own site archives were safe from loss, and means by which to scrape massive public archives when it becomes clear that they might be taken down by the authorities running them. This is not an imaginary scenario, as members were able to testify, and of course as we have seen recently in the States.

Finally, people voted on which topics they are keen to see covered in future webinars of the ATI Network, with youth and AI decision-making being most popular – so watch this space for those webinars to happen.