iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 8h

Dubious that copyright law can meaningfully mitigate AI safety risks. But also: this seems to be an admission from the UK's AI minister that the approach favoured by lobbyists for the creative industries – that AI companies can just pay to license the IP they need to train models – also isn't viable

He addressed calls from lawmakers to ban development of so-called 'superintelligence,' a hypothetical future form of AI with more advanced thinking skills than any human. Narayan said that superintelligence is already impossible to build in the U.K., as the country's copyright laws mean it's already "illegal" to build cutting-edge AI large language models.

"What further law would you need, given that it is currently illegal to develop a frontier large language model … given the copyright position that we have in this country and, frankly, given the overall compute situation that we have in this country?"

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 9h

Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) Food and You 2 report: wave 11 www.gov.uk/government/p... from @foodgov.bsky.social FHRS data ratings.food.gov.uk/open-data Why are food businesses in England *still* not required by law to display their food hygiene rating? #foodstandards #foodsafety #opendata

Screenshot of a chart labelled:

Figure 16: The percentage of respondents who thought that food businesses should be required by law to display their food hygiene rating on the premises, among those who had heard of the FHRS from wave 2 to wave 11.

Related narrative (from the linked article):

In wave 11 (May 2025 to August 2025), 94% of respondents who had heard of the FHRS thought that food businesses should be required by law to display their food hygiene rating on the premises, and 3% thought it should be up to the business to decide whether to display their food hygiene rating. A further 3% of respondents said they didn't know whether this should be a legal requirement or up to the business to decide.

Support for mandatory display of food hygiene ratings at food business premises remained consistently high over time, and in all three countries. In all waves, over 9 in 10 (91-95%) respondents who had heard of the FHRS, reported that food businesses should be required by law to display their food hygiene rating at their premises.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17h

Latest #openaddresses from local government: Surrey Heath Borough Council, in the South East region of England, has released its Council Tax address list as open data www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-ad... (no download yet) #FOI #UKhousing #proptech #localgov #opendata

Screenshot of geocoded Surrey Heath Borough Council address data visualised in Leaflet with background mapping from OpenStreetMap

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Shopping around for a personal AI agent, any suggestions

Photo of a man on a Segway, taken in 2007 by Steve Rhodes (from Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I see that Data Mill North is now a publisher in the National Data Library directory (i.e. the Data.gov.uk catalogue) www.data.gov.uk/search?publi... Confusing – Data Mill North was started by Leeds City Council but publishes data from numerous public bodies datamillnorth.org #govtech #opendata

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Big companies warn lack of 'AI openness' could hit investment in Europe www.ft.com/content/aeab... (£) In this framing, 'AI openness' = "whether data protection rules allowed them to use company and client information for AI applications" #genAI #AIpolicy #techpolicy #dataprotection #openwashing

One big US bank said it used a traffic-light system to rank countries on criteria including whether their government had made AI use a priority and whether data protection rules allowed them to use company and client information for AI applications.

"We are less inclined to add headcount in countries we consider red for AI adoption," said an executive from the bank. "There are certain countries in mainland Europe that fall into that category; we consider the UK greenish," they added.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This week I had an FOI response in which a council said it was withholding address information because disclosure might undermine Ordnance Survey's "market control" Just stick to the script, you're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud …

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Big job – Group Director, Enforcement at Ofcom ofcom.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Ofcom_... Newly created role; the UK regulator is splitting its Legal and Enforcement Group into two separately managed service areas Includes enforcement of the Online Safety Act, so this is your chance to be famous

This is a newly created role, reflecting the growing importance of Ofcom's enforcement work, especially as we implement the Online Safety Act. The Group Director, Enforcement will be a member of Ofcom's Senior Management Team and report directly to the Chief Executive. They will lead the Enforcement Group, a team of around 110 colleagues, which until now has been part of our wider Legal and Enforcement Group. The Group Director will ensure focus and coherence at a time of growing regulatory responsibilities and increasing complexity in Ofcom's work.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Job – Head of Information Rights Unit at the Welsh Government (based in Wales) www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi... #FOI /EIRs #dataprotection

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

NHS to suspend staff suspected of snooping on patient records www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... NHS England letter: Unauthorised, inappropriate and unjustifiable access to confidential patient information www.england.nhs.uk/publication/... #NHSdata #patientdata #dataprotection

NHS staff in England suspected of looking at patient records without a valid reason will be immediately suspended as part of a "zero-tolerance crackdown" on snooping.

Those under suspicion will also be locked out of NHS computer systems, preventing any further viewing of confidential records, including from home.

NHS England chief executive Sir Jim Mackey has written to every trust, ordering the measures to be introduced immediately to strengthen protection against data breaches.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Social media users end up on government list for speaking out against Prevent metro.co.uk/2026/09/25/s... UK Government monitoring X for people who publicly criticise Prevent www.rightsandsecurity.org/government-m... Related ICO decision ico.org.uk/action-weve-... #FOI #govcomms

Social media posts criticising government policy are being monitored and investigated by officials, Metro can reveal.

Negative X and Reddit posts from unsuspecting Brits attacking the UK's anti-terror programme Prevent were added to a database of critical online comments.

Metro has obtained a list of nearly 80 critical posts found and logged by the Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU), which oversees Prevent, between March 2024 and February 2025.

One campaign group whose tweet was recorded in the database said the revelations raised 'serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest' in the UK.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Matching STATS19 collision data to a road network: feasibility www.gov.uk/government/s... report from DfT's statistics team Road Safety Data www.gov.uk/government/s... DfT's collision data is open … but OS NGD RoadLink isn't #roadsafety #transportdata #opendata #datapolicy

OS NGD RoadLink was selected for the feasibility study because DfT can access it through the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement, it provides detailed national road geometry and attributes, and it is related to the mapping used in the CRASH system used by many police forces to provide STATS19 data to DfT. In future, the road safety statistics team will agree the appropriate network product and version with the DfT roads geography team, taking account of the networks already used across road statistics, update timing, historic consistency and production support.

Because OS NGD is not an open dataset, the Department will confirm with OS which derived attributes, identifiers and aggregate outputs, if any, could be published or shared under licence. This will be explored further as the work progresses.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Transcripts of last week's evidence session on Machinery of Government changes have been published by the Commons Science and Technology Committee committees.parliament.uk/work/9978/ma... (UK) Various think tank people, mainly hedging on whether the breakup of DSIT makes sense #govtech #techpolicy

Q17 Freddie van Mierlo: I want to ask about the role of DCMS. Under the previous Government, it was rumoured that there was even a proposal for it to be scrapped. It is probably fairly acceptable to say that it is one of the weaker Departments, and it is also rumoured to have a Secretary of State who is not particularly interested in it.

Emily Darlington: I don't think that's true.

Chair: Certainly, that is not the impression that I've got—

Freddie van Mierlo: It has been reported. Do you think that moving responsibility for Ofcom, digital infrastructure and other important items into that Department strengthens it, or does it risk putting those things into a silo?

Alex Thomas: I do not think DCMS has been a weaker Department in terms of the quality of its personnel or anything else—well, I will leave the political debates to you.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

UK Government spend data: ● Cab Office, Apr 2010 - Aug 2026 drive.google.com/uc?export=do... (3.8 MB XLSX) ● DfE, Apr 2010 - Jun 2026 drive.google.com/uc?export=do... (56.6 MB zipped CSV) ● DESNZ, Aug 2023 - Dec 2025 drive.google.com/uc?export=do... (0.9 MB XLSX) #publicspending #opengov #opendata

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

FOI release: Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-lr... Land Registry has disclosed to me the MoU announced in this press release last month www.gov.uk/government/n... (The MoU was developed late last year) #FOI #proptech

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Council Tax: stock of properties, 2026 www.gov.uk/government/s... updated statistics on housing stock in England and Wales from HMRC's Valuation Office Includes small area (MSOA/LSOA) counts for Council Tax band, property type, and build period, as at 31 March 2026 #UKhousing #opendata

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Latest #openaddresses from local government: Harlow Council, in the East of England, has released its Council Tax address list as open data www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-ad... (no download yet) Without UPRNs, so no map this time #FOI #UKhousing #localgov #opendata

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Pangram was also the tool the Telegraph used, earlier this month, to try to convince readers that Andy Burnham's "love letter to Manchester" was written with AI www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/202... America Has a Pangram Problem www.theatlantic.com/technology/2... (from May) It's all an ad campaign

@peterkwells.com@peterkwells.com

Repeat after me: AI detectors like Pangram *do not have a consistent error rate*, it varies due to things like author, their use of language, their writing style, the type of text being produced &c &c &c www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Serco launches NadirEO to turn Earth Observation data into operational insight www.serco.com/eu/media-and... Please no one tell them what "nadir" means outside geography

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Same difference committees.parliament.uk/publications... #techpolicy #govcomms

Extract from a letter sent by UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan MP in reply to Liam Byrne MP, Chair of the Commons Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee:

I am happy to confirm that I did not send a letter to my Cabinet colleagues on AI regulation last week, but I did publish an op-ed in the Times. I have included a copy of this article with this letter for your information and ease, which sets out the Government’s approach to AI regulation.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Dr Jade Leung appointed Vice-Chair of AI Security Institute and Security Advisor to the AI Taskforce www.gov.uk/government/n... Previously Starmer's AI adviser. Governance Lead at OpenAI until 2023 "A new Adviser on AI to the Prime Minister will be appointed in due course." #AIpolicy #techpolicy

As part of the transition, she will step back from her full-time roles as the Prime Minister's Adviser on AI and Chief Technology Officer of the AI Security Institute at the end of September due to personal circumstances.

As the Prime Minister's Adviser on AI, Dr Leung has helped shape the government's approach to advanced AI, supporting work across the public sector, national security and economic growth. She also played a leading role in establishing the AI Security Institute, helping build its technical research capability and programme of work.

In her new roles, Dr Leung will continue to provide strategic advice on AI safety and security, supporting the government's work to prepare for the opportunities and challenges presented by advanced AI.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Job – Senior Developer "building and improving the performance of the National Data Library platform" at the Government Digital Service (GDS) in Bristol, London or Manchester www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi... The librarian jobs are on another site, I think #govtech #opendata -ish

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The Scottish Government's harvester for sending metadata to the National Data Library is on the fritz again. New records for a set of 38 flood-related datasets have been created in duplicate every day since mid-August www.data.gov.uk/search?query... Will GDS notice at some point #govtech #opendata

Screenshot of a table showing a list of Scottish Government SpatialData.gov.scot metadata records for flood-related datasets published to the National Data Library directory 14/08/2026 - 21/09/2026, with counts of the number of records for each dataset

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The demands in this recent speech by Writers' Guild president Jack Thorne, on 'Authorship in the Age of AI', are detached from reality Via writersguild.org.uk/jack-thorne-... "Thorne's speech was followed by a Q&A discussion with Baroness Beeban Kidron" because of course it was #genAI #techpolicy

outside, it doesn't seem as if there is an intention for this to lead to the transparency Baroness Kidron asked for. So let's be clear, we need mandatory data sets in which developers publish audited summaries of every input that has led to their outputs. We need watermarking for every text used.

(ii) The texts that are used need to generate a cost. Those with copyright need to be paid for their work being used. That's what these Court cases are arguing for. These costs need to be large enough that generating ideas through machines isn't necessarily cheaper than generating ideas through humans. How these particular costs are calculated is going to be immensely difficult

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Latest #openaddresses from local government: Oadby and Wigston Borough Council, in the East Midlands of England, has released its Council Tax address list as open data www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-ad... (no download yet) Very swift response, all sorted within a week #FOI #UKhousing #opendata

Screenshot of geocoded Oadby and Wigston Borough Council address data visualised in Leaflet with background mapping from OpenStreetMap

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Measuring artificial intelligence in the UK economy using a thematic account www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nati... article from ONS Good luck with that I guess

● Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly understood as a general-purpose technology with the potential to significantly alter production processes, investment behaviour, labour demand, business organisation and productivity across the economy.
● There is a lot of debate around the impact AI is having on the UK economy but because of the lack of granularity and visibility of AI in the economic statistics frameworks it is challenging to fully isolate this impact at this time.
● The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will develop a thematic account that remains consistent with the core national accounts principles, to provide insights into AI's contribution to the UK economy.
● We have identified several product categories that are AI-relevant in the UK economy and have substantiated this identification with reasons for their selection.
● The article acknowledges several conceptual, definitional, data, residency and economic ownership challenges within estimating the contribution of AI to the UK economy, which the AI thematic account work will look to resolve.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Latest #openaddresses from local government: Huntingdonshire District Council, in the East of England, has released its Council Tax address list as open data www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-ad... (no download yet) #FOI #UKhousing #proptech #localgov #opendata

Screenshot of geocoded Huntingdonshire District Council address data visualised in Leaflet with background mapping from OpenStreetMap

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Neets 'must be tracked on a national database until age 24', Milburn recommends observer.co.uk/news/nationa... We must do more to track and monitor the youth but it's only for their own good

The unified database would allow schools, colleges, councils, job centres, youth services and mayoral strategic authorities to share information and see in real time when a young person stops attending education or work. The system would track people from the age of 16 to 24. Currently, monitoring and support end at 18.

Milburn, who is leading the government's Young People and Work Review, will tell ministers that the database should be used to trigger immediate and practical action when somebody stops going to school, college or work, rather than just passively monitoring their behaviour.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

RNLI fears staff data stolen after far-Right targets members www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/09... This is the Telegraph gleefully chumming the waters. The Beacon CRM breach was in July, well before the recent fash campaign against RNLI volunteers, and affected numerous orgs across the charity sector

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

NHS executive lobbied data watchdog to rewrite criticism before Palantir deal www.ft.com/content/63bf... (£) Published version of Nicola Byrne's post in August 2023 www.gov.uk/government/n... Byrne's term as National Data Guardian ends in March #FOI #NHSdata #patientdata #datasharing #govtech

Emails from August 2023 obtained by the FT through a freedom of information request show Byrne delayed publishing the statement about the FDP after Ming Tang, NHS England's then chief data officer, warned it would "create significant problems" for her.

Tang raised concerns about what she argued was "inflammatory" language and a lack of balance in the statement after Byrne shared an advance copy.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Interview with Alex Craven, co-founder of thedatacity.bsky.social, which has apparently launched in the US: 'I want to build a tech unicorn from Leeds' businesscloud.co.uk/news/i-want-... (Tom Forth is namechecked as "Tom Ford")

"I did a proper business planning exercise: what is this problem? How big is it? And actually, it’s everywhere in the world,” says Alex. “Every industrial classification system is broken everywhere."

In the UK, there are 4.5 million active companies – but only 2.8m which actually do anything, and only 1.4m that employ more than one person.

The Data City has classified them all. "The real economy is around a million businesses," says Alex. "We match them to their websites, and then we classify them into the industries that they actually operate in."

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Moving Share Homes for Ukraine data's code to open source mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2026/09/18/m... Shiny new GitHub repo github.com/communitiesu... This is the system that MHCLG built in-house instead of paying £10 million to continue using Palantir's Foundry software #govtech #techpolicy

Working in the open can be daunting! All your mistakes would be there for the world to see in a public code repository, with nowhere to hide... However, open source code is part of how we build software in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and a key part of the government Service Manual for digital services ("make source code open and reusable"). Sharing our code means that other government departments and people in outside organisations can benefit from our work, saving time and money.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

If you are disappointed with Tom Watson today, have you recently awoke from a coma

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

AI is the greatest innovation in coding since the invention of copying from Stack Overflow

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Land use statistics in England: methodology changes www.gov.uk/government/c... consultation launched by MHCLG Changes to OS address data products have fuxored the time series, new taxonomy proposed

The new statistics will represent a break in the time series as represented by the legacy statistics from 2013 to 2022. This is unavoidable given the shift from the old LUCS classes to the new OS Tier A/B taxonomy, and in the underlying data from AddressBase/MasterMap to the NGD. The detail at which land is mapped, the way land use is determined, and the way features are grouped into sites all change because of these shifts. Figures from the new series should therefore not be directly compared with those published up to 2022, and we will be explicit about this in the publications.

We considered attempting to mitigate this break by approximately recreating the old LUCS categories from the new data. However, the cross-mapping required to do this would be the department’s own approximation, as the NGD does not natively support LUCS attribution. Given this, and the fact that not all LUCS categories have an obvious or consistent OS Tier A equivalent, such a cross-mapping risks creating a false sense of continuity and comparability between the old and new series that the underlying data cannot reliably support.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

"Effective altruism" is altruistic in much the same way that national socialism was socialist, glad to clear that up

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them www.theregister.com/security/202... Ofcom evidence to the Lords Communications and Digital Committee committees.parliament.uk/event/28206/... (video, no transcript yet) List of fines www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/...

Ofcom chiefs have acknowledged that most fines issued under the Online Safety Act (OSA) remain unpaid, highlighting limitations in the comms regulator's enforcement powers.

The regulator's director of enforcement, Suzanne Cater, told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee that although another payment arrived this week, "realistically the majority have not been paid."

Ofcom has imposed fines totaling more than £7 million ($9.4 million) on 11 service providers under its OSA powers so far, but when asked, it refused to specify exactly how many have not paid, nor detail the payment that came in this week.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Non-falsifiable, like all the best political slogans. Nobody measures growth using postcode geography

Screenshot of a tweet on X from the UK Labour Party. The tweet says "Labour delivering good growth in every postcode." There is a photo of First Secretary of State Louise Haigh, who appears to be speaking, with additional text: "No more people written off. No more places left behind. That is good growth in every postcode."

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Job – Head of Data & Digital (fixed term) at the National Biodiversity Network Trust, apparently home-based nbn.org.uk/news/nbn-tru... NBN Atlas nbnatlas.org #biodiversity #opendata -adjacent

● Lead the NBN Trust's data and digital function, providing strategic and functional leadership across the NBN Atlas, related digital products and services, and the Trust's wider data and digital portfolio.
● Line manages the Trust’s data and technical team managers, ensuring clear priorities, strong performance, proportionate governance, and effective delivery across business as usual, funded projects, and strategic development.
● Ensure the Trust's data and digital work is led in a way that is inclusive, accessible, and supportive of a diverse range of staff, partners, and users.
● Deliver the Trust's 2-year organisational sustainability project, "Building a Sustainable Future for the UK's Biodiversity Data Heritage" (funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund), including the development and testing of value-added data and digital services, web-hosted products, and support offers that strengthen financial resilience without compromising the Trust's public good role.
● Support the strategic direction, stewardship, and future sustainability of the NBN Atlas, related digital products and services, and the Trust's wider technical delivery, ensuring that risks, opportunities, and investment choices are well managed.
● Play an active role in the NBN Trust's Executive Team, contributing to organisational planning, funding development, cross Trust collaboration, and external engagement where this supports delivery and the Trust's wider strategic objectives.
● The role provides strategic and functional leadership across the Trust's data and digital work, working closely with the Principal Software Engineer as the Trust's senior software engineering lead.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Family Food datasets containing detailed statistics on household purchases of food and drink in the UK have been updated with 2025 data www.gov.uk/government/s... Annual report www.gov.uk/government/s... #livingstandards #publichealth #defradata #opendata

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Latest #openaddresses from local government: Adur District Council and Worthing Borough Council, in the South East of England, have both released their Council Tax address lists as open data www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-ad... (with download links) No UPRNs though #FOI #UKhousing #opendata

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

ICO expected to overturn FOI refusal on supernatural requests www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/2655329... + www.southampton.gov.uk/modernGov/ie... Southampton Council is rejecting 5.6% of requests as "vexatious" – suggests to me somebody senior has misconstrued the exemption's scope and dug in their heels

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The 4chan/Lolcow vs Ofcom case in the US has been dismissed www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209... TL;DR Ofcom does have sovereign immunity actually I am sympathetic to the providers' resistance to OSA, but this case had little legal merit and was mainly a vehicle for tendentious political rhetoric

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Register of British Slave Traders britishslavetraders.org Slavery was not a footnote to British history. It helped shape the nation www.theguardian.com/uk-news/comm... by William Pettigrew

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

DCMS is "one of the weaker departments, and rumoured also to have a Secretary of State who is not very interested in the Department", according to Freddie van Mierlo MP (Lib Dem) in the Science and Technology Committee session this morning So rude!

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I think we'll be fine with the risk to humanity, if AI will just reassure us that it won't overwrite capitalism

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Why can I search the UK Parliament site for individual members of the House of Lords by party, gender, and policy interests, but not by level of addlement?

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

A letter published today confirms DCMS is going ahead with the review of ICO's culture and governance that Liz Kendall announced in July committees.parliament.uk/publications... This follows from the business with John Edwards ICO becomes the Information Commission on 30 Sep #FOI #dataprotection

We can confirm that the independent review is going ahead. Work is underway to select and appoint the reviewer, and to confirm their terms of reference and governance arrangements.

Appointment of the reviewer is subject to standard processes and procedures being completed, such as a conflicts of interest check. It would not be appropriate to comment on potential reviewers, or to set out a definitive timetable, before those processes have concluded.

The review will begin its work as soon as the necessary steps are complete, and we will write to the Committee with the review’s terms of reference, details of the appointed reviewer, and the timetable for the review when they are confirmed, which we expect to be early in autumn.

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Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

UK Parliament report: Procedure Committee proposes overhaul of the Written Parliamentary Questions system committees.parliament.uk/committee/12... WPQs questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-ques... #FOI #opengov

WPQs system vs Freedom of Information requests: As WPQs serve the vital constitutional function of government accountability to Parliament, they must be treated by the government with at least equal seriousness to FOI requests. The Committee recommends that the Leader of the House reinforce with departments that they must never withhold from a WPQ response information that is releasable under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 — and indeed should sometimes go further in WPQ responses than is required under that Act, given the primacy of the constitutional principle of government accountability to Parliament.

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