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.

 —

Image: Kylie Haulk

At the beginning of the year, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: to help a group of small organisations working with marginalised communities to run Freedom of Information–based campaigns using WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch-request and project features. We recruited groups working in areas as varied as domestic abuse, arts funding, youth health, SEND provision, parental leave, fuel poverty, and migrant justice. 

As the year draws to a close, we’re reflecting on the project and the lessons we’ve learned from it. It’s been a total privilege working closely with these organisations, because it gave us a front-row view of the real challenges of frontline campaigning and community support. 

What became clear early on was that the hardest part of a batch-request project isn’t actually pressing “send”.  Campaigners know their issues intimately, but FOI requires a specific kind of precision: pinning down exactly what data will answer their question, what format it should be in, and which public bodies actually hold it. Moving from “we want to understand this issue” to “we need these five questions answered from these 150 authorities” is a surprisingly big leap. 

Luckily, WhatDoTheyKnow’s knowledgeable  volunteers were able to help our groups go from vague policy areas to precise questions, and to understand what information was already out there. One of our groups didn’t end up submitting a big batch request, as in the course of their preparatory research they found an already-published dataset from an industry body they didn’t know existed. This is still a win — proactive publication by authorities makes everyone’s life easier.

In the cases where we had good questions and had identified the right authorities, we then still had to tackle the practical reality: for small teams already stretched thin, a large FOI project which asks a lot of questions requires capacity to deal with the answers. These can come in a diversity of forms: follow-ups, clarifications, refusals, delays, internal reviews. Our Projects tool helps to make dealing with the range of responses easier, but the scale of the challenge can still require serious commitment of time and resources. Zarino shared his experience of this on our blog back in October.

Just this week we had a moment that illustrates this: one of the groups we were supporting sent a batch FOI request to 133 universities on 5 July. As I write this in December, they are still receiving responses. The most recent one, a refusal, arrived five months after the original request! 

We’ve got two strands of thought here. On one hand, it’s good to be realistic. Although these moments are frustrating, they also teach us to be prepared for slow, unpredictable timelines, and that persistence is part of the craft. On the other hand, we feel strongly that citizens shouldn’t have to be quite so persistent, that pace shouldn’t be quite so slow, nor unpredictable. That’s why we’re advocating for upstream policy improvements, such as in our recent evidence to the Scottish Parliament, and in our upcoming FOI Fest conference.

Although it’s not always been straightforward, this year reinforced why FOI is worth the effort. A particularly strong example came from SCALP and Netpol’s From Scotland to Gaza report, which, with our help, used batch FOI requests to uncover policing practices around protests. Their methodical approach combined data from public bodies with testimonies to make a compelling case that has shaped media coverage and public debate. It’s a reminder that FOI doesn’t just extract information, it empowers communities to speak with confidence.

All of this left us with a clearer sense of what we can do in future to help make big FOI projects work. A few lessons stood out:

• Start smaller: a 10-authority pilot builds confidence and tests the strength of the question.
• Co-design the requests: working together on wording and structure reduces uncertainty: the organisations have expertise of their area, while our volunteers have second-to-none understanding of how to write a clear request.
• Prepare organisations for the long tail: follow-ups, delays, and refusals are, unfortunately, to be expected, not signs of failure of the project. 
• Volunteers can help with the volume of work: Climate Emergency UK have set the standard for how to train, empower and mobilise the cohorts they need to churn through large quantities of data.
• See FOI as a strategic, not administrative tool: it’s most useful when tied directly to campaign goals.

We fundamentally believe that every organisation can benefit from FOI; they just need the right scaffolding and resources. If you know what you’re in for, the whole process becomes far less intimidating.

What next? We’re refining our approach, watching what happens with our initial batch of projects, and constantly updating our guides and help pages to support our users in their big and small FOI projects. Every request is a small act of collective muscle-building. We’re excited to keep learning and keep improving the support that makes those acts possible.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

Around the world today, organisations and communities are recognising the 26th International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This is a moment to reflect on one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world – but it’s also a call to action.

As one small action in that continued effort, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) this year, to explore how something like our Local Intelligence Hub could help their members organise for change.

Little did we expect that, in building a prototype Data Hub for them to explore their needs, we’d discover a gaping hole in data collection about the safety of girls at schools in 16% of local authorities.

But first, what were we aiming to achieve?

In a post last month, I shared some of the goals of this work – such as using data to galvanise support from MPs, to monitor patterns that official bodies might miss, and to help EVAW’s members make the case for increased local funding to address violence against women and girls (VAWG).

I also shared how we were using the batch request tools in WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (our advanced Freedom Of Information service) to generate new public data on VAWG prevalence in schools.

And, of course, all of this work builds on top of the Local Intelligence Hub we designed and built with The Climate Coalition and Green Alliance – which has already proved its worth as a tool for community organising and public affairs, including through events like this Summer’s #ActNowChangeForever Mass Lobby, and The Climate Coalition’s Great Big Green Week.

Now it’s time for an update – how did we get on?

A replicable pipeline of brand new VAWG data

When we built the Local Intelligence Hub with The Climate Coalition (TCC), much of the data we included was already publicly available: MP information from Parliament, demographic data from the ONS, public opinion data shared by polling companies. Combined with TCC member organisations’ own data on their local support and activities, the Hub was able to present a nuanced picture of climate and nature are being protected across the whole country.

We knew we faced a different challenge with the VAWG data hub. As I explained last month, public data in this space is often incomplete, or missing entirely. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to test how WhatDoTheyKnow and the Local Intelligence Hub could work together to generate and then publish brand new datasets on VAWG prevalence or activity, made public through FOI requests to local authorities and policing bodies.

We chose school safeguarding referral figures as a suitably challenging example that was also indicative of levels of risk to children. When school staff fear a child may be in danger in any way, they are meant to refer it to the safeguarding team at their local authority. The UK government collects some information about these referrals as part of its Children In Need census, but the definition of a “child in need” is somewhat open to interpretation, and we and EVAW both suspected that, as a result, the official data was only telling part of the story. The census also only covers local authorities in England, leaving Scotland and Wales to collect their own, incompatible data (the CRCS census in Wales, and Children’s Services Plans in Scotland).

With the help of the WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers, we drafted an FOI request to be sent to every UK local authority with a responsibility for education, asking for three things:

1. The total number of safeguarding referrals made to them, by schools in their area – this is data that technically should be collected by the CIN census for English authorities, but we suspect is not
2. Any sort of categorical breakdown they held about those referrals, such as a breakdown of the genders of the children involved – this doesn’t currently appear in any public dataset that we know of
3. The total number of schoolchildren in their area

You can browse the requests and responses on WhatDoTheyKnow. Here are some key things we learned through the process:

No matter how much you research your request, something will slip through

Our background research and even our first pilot requests failed to reveal that the total number of schoolchildren is something that’s already published for England, Scotland, and Wales. Thankfully, many authorities simply pointed us to this data (with a “Section 21” refusal – “information already accessible”), but others continued to provide the data for each year we requested. Had we known in advance that the data was already available to us, we could have left it out of our requests to English, Scottish and Welsh authorities. We can only hope, since this is such basic information, the authorities who did go on to provide the data to us didn’t spend too long gathering it.

You will receive information in every format imaginable, and your data extraction process needs to handle that

We asked for responses to be provided in a “re-usable, machine-readable format” if the authority deemed the information to meet the FOI Act definition of a ‘dataset’. 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.

We also knew authorities might hold the information by calendar, academic, or financial reporting year, so we gave them the freedom to provide it to us in whichever scheme they had. Unsurprisingly, we received responses across all three (57% calendar year, 35% financial year, 8% academic year).

Happily, the crowdsourcing interface in WhatDoTheyKnow Projects enabled us to make relatively quick work of extracting the data we needed, but we were ultimately only able to extract a fraction of the information some authorities provided and we found that some of the interpretation of the responses (ie: “is this a financial year, or an academic year?”) heavily relied on human intuition, which means we’ll need to think carefully about the way we structure future requests, if we want to process the data through any sort of automated pipeline.

Complex requests are a risk

The more information you request, the more useful it might be to you, but the more you risk the public authority refusing to answer it on “Section 12” cost grounds. WhatDoTheyKnow’s advice is to keep your request as short and focused as possible. But we knew that historical data, across a few metrics and a few years, would be most useful to the VAWG Data Hub’s users, so we asked for as much as we felt we could justify – and it mostly paid off.

70% of responses to our batch request contained both key pieces of data we wanted (the total referrals for multiple years, and the gender breakdown). Another 7% contained just the yearly totals, without any gender breakdown.

7% are still awaiting a response, even now, over a month after the statutory deadline. And 6% of authorities said they didn’t hold the information at all (because they, surprisingly, don’t record the referrals they receive). Which leaves 10% who refused our request on cost grounds. If our request had been simpler, this number of refusals would likely have been smaller.

However, this result is in itself interesting: at least 16% of local authorities responsible for handling safeguarding referrals either don’t record them, or record them in such a way that it would take more than 18 hours of officer time to report how many they received in a given year, or how many relate to girls.

If the government is serious about halving violence against women and girls within a decade, this is precisely the sort of data local authorities will need at their fingertips, in order to monitor progress and allocate resources. The fact that it’s effectively inaccessible to 16% of them right now is a worry.

Combining data for new patterns and new questions

Remember how I mentioned we were adapting the Local Intelligence Hub for EVAW’s needs?

With our FOI data extracted through WhatDoTheyKnow, we were able to very quickly load it into a prototype VAWG Data Hub. Alongside it, we loaded in a whole new area type to filter by—“Policing areas” or Police & Crime Commissioners—as well as some examples of crime prevalence data (the number of reported VAWG-related incidents, by policing area) and public policy guidelines data (the Council Of Europe’s recommended minimums for VAWG service provision).

Thanks to my colleague Alex’s improvements to our TheyWorkForYou Votes infrastructure, we were also able to make quick work of importing VAWG-related MP data into this new hub – including VAWG-related parliamentary groups that MPs might be sitting on, or relevant votes and motions they’d supported.

Plus, of course, there was all the usual MP and area data that campaigners and public affairs teams have already found so useful on the Local Intelligence Hub – things like election results, public attitudes polling, and income and poverty indicators.

Data in action

With the data in place, it was possible for us to give EVAW’s member organisations a demonstration of how they could use a data hub like this as part of their campaigning, fundraising, and policy influencing work. For example, to find the council areas with the most school safeguarding referrals for girls and also the highest overall deprivation:

Or to find the MPs with the strongest support for VAWG prevention, but in constituencies with high VAWG prevalence:

All of the data we demonstrated this Autumn is still a work in progress, but it was reassuring to see almost 70% of members on a recent demo call saying that a VAWG data hub like this would “definitely” be useful to them in their day-to-day work.

We look forward to honing the VAWG Data Hub further with EVAW and their members, to make sure we’re asking the right questions, and presenting an accurate picture of the VAWG landscape.

Header image: Khyati Trehan, for Google Deepmind – Pexels Free License.

Do you live somewhere that boasts a magnificent municipal clock — a timepiece that anyone passing by can look up to, and check that they’re nicely on time for their next appointment? A vast clockface on the side of the town hall, perhaps; or a golden clocktower standing tall above the shopping streets…a landmark under which to meet friends?

OK, good. The next question is: does that clock actually work? 

If its hands have come to a solid halt; or it’s running at a dogged twenty minutes behind time; or its rusted chimes, once mellifluous, now sound more like the rasping call of an imperilled frog, the chances are that it’s been logged on the Stopped Clocks website.

Here you can see which clocks near you have fallen into disrepair; or check the time, which is delivered to you along with an apposite poem.  

The site is the work of Alfie Dennen, who describes himself as “somewhere between a technologist and an activist — with a tendency towards action over academics”.

It’s not entirely out of character, as he explains: “I’ve been building things for the web that blend activism and tech since the late nineties: for example We’re Not Afraid was a project that spoke to London’s — certainly my — defiance after the bomb attacks of 7/7; and Bus Tops was a project for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad which aimed to democratise both access to and the creation of public art.”

Nor has the project sprung up overnight. It all began with Alfie’s realisation that he could become the clock-winder that kept his own local clocktower, in North London’s Caledonian Park, ticking.

“Restarting the Cally clock in 2012 cemented for me that both documenting, and hopefully one day restoring, public clocks was a worthwhile thing to spend some significant portion of my life doing.”

Now, this is a very mySociety-type project, blending coding, community, and a sense of shared responsibility. We probably would have written about it anyway. But also, in gathering the data he needed, Alfie made substantial use not just of Freedom of Information through our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro service, but also our MapIt points-to-boundaries software — so we have all the more reason to ask him all about it.

To begin with, how did he realise that FOI might be a good tool to help with the site?

As you’ll see if you click around, the project crowdsources information — so if you know of a local clock that hasn’t been included, you can add it yourself. To identify which council area they sit within (see the map page here), Alfie had been using MapIt to generate boundary information.That gave him a vague awareness of mySociety and our other services, including WhatDoTheyKnow.

“I’d never used FOI before, but I realised that it’d be a great way to get baseline data over and above the data I can gather about stopped clocks directly — given that walking every street in the UK is a bit out of my current comfort zone!

“When I went to look at WhatDoTheyKnow properly, I released that I could send FOI requests in a batch, and that got me super enthused. Suddenly the looming month-long period of finding spare time to do them one by one disappeared! WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch process, and clear interface to manage status as they were responded to, has been such a useful tool for me.”

Great — so, having sent off lots of requests, has Alfie seen any responses yet?

“The deadline for responses was the 21 November for most of the requests, but there’s still hope that some more will come in. 

“So far, of the 308 councils I contacted, 107 have given substantive responses. 70 councils responded to say they held “no information” and 113 are delayed or still pending. Between them, they identified 231 council-managed clocks, of which 175 are working, 34 have stopped, and 22 have an unknown status. 

“So about 15% of council-managed clocks are stopped, which honestly is better than I expected. But here’s the thing that really stood out: when I cross-referenced this with my database of 243 stopped clocks, it turns out that only about 40 are actually council-managed. The vast majority (so far) — 84% — are outside of the scope of Freedom of Information as they are in private hands, or owned by churches, or other bodies that used to be public but aren’t any more. In this sense, privatisation has created a clear accountability gap.

“The responses have varied greatly, which is interesting in itself. Some councils sent back detailed spreadsheets detailing every clock they manage, with maintenance schedules, budgets  — the lot. Some look after lots of clocks, while others have none at all — apparently. Only 6.4% of councils could tell us what they spend on clock maintenance. Of these, the average maintenance cost was £2,929/year.

So, curiosity aside, how will all this data be put to use?

“A big part of why I’ve been doing this foundational research through FOI requests is to provide a backbone to a book I’m writing, which looks at the last 45 years of austerity in the UK through the somehow very human lens of stopped public clocks. 

“Yes, stopped clocks are a small thing in the round when we look at all the issues facing our communities, cities and civic spaces today.

“But they’re also the perfect way to talk to people about how they feel about their town, their neighbourhood, their city. Ultimately this is my main aim: reaching people where they are to talk about re-engaging with our civic space, coming together and understanding each other and our built spaces in ways we once did but have lost sight of.

“The civic infrastructure which once supported the maintenance of public clocks has been systematically stripped away through a combination of privatisation and austerity dating back to 1979. 

“But I wanted the data to be useful beyond just the book, so I’ve built it into the Stopped Clocks website as an interactive policy tab. You can see the map of all FOI-tagged clocks, filter by ownership type, and read through the timeline of disinvestment.

“More practically, it means when someone finds a stopped clock in their town and wonders, “who’s supposed to be looking after this?”, maybe they will find the answer on the site. And if they want to campaign to get it fixed, they’ve got evidence: council responses, maintenance data, the broader context of how we got here.”

Each clock boasts a number of tags, so for example you can see which data came through FOI requests, and which council area they’re in — that part is thanks to MapIt.

“I’m also tagging clocks with their ownership type, which is a somewhat manual process; and whether they’re on listed buildings, using the Historic England API. 

“Tagging lets us start seeing clearer patterns, like how Lottery-funded church restorations from the 90s are failing on a very predictable timeline, or how privatised civic buildings — former town halls, libraries — now in commercial hands are disproportionately neglected.”

And so finally, what plans does Alfie have for the project? Presumably he has a strong incentive to avoid the irony of its becoming an untended asset itself.

“I can see a path towards a Stopped Clocks charitable foundation that does two things at once: gets clocks running again, and uses that process to rebuild civic engagement at the local level. 

“Because here’s what happens when you try to fix a stopped clock: you immediately find out who owns it, who’s responsible for it, why it stopped, why nobody’s fixed it. And that leads you straight into conversations about council budgets, privatised buildings, who decides what gets maintained and what doesn’t.

“It’s a way into talking about austerity and privatisation that doesn’t feel abstract or preachy. It’s just there, on the town hall, stopped. 

“People care about these things; they notice them every day, they remember when they worked. That gives you something to organise around that’s tangible and achievable. 

“Fix one clock, learn how the system works — or doesn’t; build the relationships and knowledge to tackle the next one.”

Many thanks to Alfie for talking to us about this project: we hope it inspires others to think differently about the assets that make up our public domain — perhaps even to ask if you can be the person who winds your own local clock.

—

Image: Kelsey Todd

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.

—

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).

—

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.

 —

* 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.

 —

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.

—

Image: Peter Lawrence