Welcome to FOI Fest twenty twenty six. Hi, everybody. My name is Ben Weddy. I'm an academic here at Birkbeck College, and I'm very aware that only I stand between you and lunch. So I will be, as quick as I can. Just to remind you, when you do leave for lunch, everybody who's here in person, do look over at Senate House because Senate House was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984 where his wife worked. Okay. So I'm gonna talk very briefly about my experience as an academic, which I think is gonna be quite distinct from the experience of journalists and campaigners. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about why I use f o y, how I've used it, and then end with a few kind of tips for the future. The first really important thing to say, this is something that both George and Lucas talked about, is that you should only use freedom information if you need to. I only use it if I can't find the information or data any other way. I'm very conscious of the burden that I could create. So how have I used it? The main way in which I've used it is to try and look across a kind of big picture of how a policy or issue is unfolding across the country. So what that normally means is local government and making so called round robins to those bodies. I've also made freedom information requests to central government and recently to some of the newly, publicly owned train bodies as well. In terms of what kind of issues I've used it for, I was very interested a few years ago as they abolished lots of the audit mechanisms across local government, the extent to which people are using their own audit rights. You probably all know better than me that for a few tantalizing days each year, you can go to your local council and look through the budgets, either physically or online. So I made a series of reply requests to see how many people have been availing themselves of that right over the past five years. More recently, there's a lot of talk in The United States about different government departments and bodies using AI as a means to process feeding information requests. So I made a series of FYI requests to central government departments to see if they were doing so. Broadly, the answer is they are not. The one that I'm actually most pleased with is one of the most recent ones. I got this from a kind of hint from a Guardian piece of investigation about in the aftermath of the dumping of the statue of slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol. I was intrigued to what extent councils have been quietly doing different things with their public spaces. And because, as you know, council still retain the power to change street names, without public consultation. And they actually discovered, through a series of experimental FOI requested through a few counsel. But actually, there has been a lot of quite positive renaming, democratic discussion, QR codes going on up and down the country in some places that you wouldn't actually expect. What's probably most interest to you though is I've not just used freedom information to find out about things. I've used freedom information to find out if freedom information works. So I designed this experiment, with a group of academics called Kings. And what we did is we used parish councils. And we asked a series of them an FOI request and a series of them something that was very obviously not an FOI request. We wrote in big letters at the beginning, this is not an FOI request. We wanted to measure which got the best response. We then took it a step further, and we also asked them to do something outside the boundaries of the act, which is to publish that piece of information on their website, which they absolutely do not have to do. Tada. Freedom of information works. And freedom of information request was twice as likely to get a response than you just asking. But even more interesting, though, that when we looked at the thing outside the boundary, we asked, will you publish this? A freedom of information question was three times more likely to get a public body to respond. So, just a few final thoughts. There are problems with using Freedom of Information. The real bottleneck is actually the basics. Finding where to send the Freedom of Information request, getting the right address, especially local government when things are in constant change, and also getting a response. That can be really difficult, especially for much smaller bodies who kinda have my sympathies. Sometimes the information doesn't exist. A lot of councils, for example, didn't hold any data about who'd looked over their accounts. That's often because nobody had, but some of them just didn't hold that information. And this is where, my life is a bit easier than campaigners or journalists. It does take time. But luckily, academia moves much more slowly than campaigning on. Yeah. So finally, my top tips which are actually, rather similar to what I've gone before as well. Ask yourself why you need it before you do. Before you make a request, check their disclosure logs if they have one. Check what do they know. If you think you've had the bright idea for an FYI request, there's a very good chance someone else has had it at some point before. I always use my academic privilege. I scatter the word academic all over the email. I tell them about what it is I'm researching. I give them access. I make sure they can see my, publications page and things like that and say why I want the information. I also ask nicely, and, I try and be very patient and realize that sometimes this can take kind of five or six six emails to really clarify what you want. But going back to what George has said and what Martin always says in his, very helpful advice on this, keep a good spreadsheet. That is absolutely the key to making successful FOI requests. And just final thoughts for the future, and actually both Lucas and George mentioned this. I'm really interested in these new bodies that are covered or partly covered by Freedom Information or EIRs, particularly water companies. And also, as of next year, eight out of 10 train journeys are going to be in a publicly owned train that's subject to Freedom of Information. So I'm very interested in how we can actually use those to measure Freedom of Information in the future. Thanks, everyone.