- [Nicole] Hello, everyone, welcome back. So this lesson today we're gonna be looking at state sources of information. So the aims are to give you an overview of this kind of various governmental sources of information and to gain an understanding of why these sources may be useful for campaign research. So as we're going along, I'm probably gonna be referencing a report that I helped make in, I just can't remember now, 2018. So this was about prison expansion in England. So looking at the kind of major growth in the prison population in the UK, the new prison builds that the government wants to build. And as with like all our projects and publications you can download them for free on our site. So there's a link here. 

But to put this report together I had to draw on so many different states sources of information. So it wasn't so much like company research but it was looking at government contracts that introduced before the contract finder websites. It was looking at planning applications of the new prisons, inspection reports from previous prisons, the office of national statistics, you know, there was like tons of different sources. And I think what I'm trying to communicate here is that you're gonna need like potentially a diversity of sources to kind of piece together the puzzle of what you're trying to find out. You know, unfortunately the state don't always just you know, share a nice big project report about how they're gonna do something. So you sometimes, you know, you need to collect bits of data and bits of information from kind of all their different outlets and then kind of get an understanding of what their plans are. 

So, yeah, but, you know, again I always talk about this, but simple, simple, simple like don't underestimate what is right in front of you. So, you know, people are, you know, in campaigns they're like, ah, how did you find that out? And I'm like it's literally on the government news website. So this link here goes to this GOV.UK news sites. So this is like all the press releases from the government and lots of them are kind of just like, not that interesting, but you might potentially find like some quite interesting stuff here around policing or different press releases. So you can search by kind of topic. You can add sub topic, you can search by person. So this might be like a particular minister or MP you're looking for and you can define your date then as well, so yeah. Again, it can sometimes just be right in front of you. And again, like with we're saying in the course please remember your research goals and what specifically you're trying to find out. That's just a screenshot. 

So yeah, the national audit office. So they scrutinize public spending for parliament and they often have very useful reports, but again, it's state propaganda, like they're trying to give an impression of a certain state project. I just opened it up this morning to see if there was anything interesting on there. You can see those report about the adult social care market in England. So if you were researching a private care company for example, you might find it interesting stuff on there. They had a really interesting report recently about, oh, I think in last summer about deportations. Had loads of data in there that campaigners could use like some of the airlines doing the work and how the ticketing system works. And yeah, so that was really useful. And yeah, here we go. So, you can see here in June last year there was this report about immigration enforcement and that was like really useful for people organizing against the border regime to see what the state are doing. 

So planning applications. These will be on like local authority websites. So, planning is generally decentralized to local authorities. If you don't know the local authorities name you can search via the postcode, this link. I'm a bit of a planning application nerd. Like I think there's this absolute goldmine of information in there. When I was doing the prison island report I printed off quite a lot of planning documents for the various prisons and went through them with a fine tooth comb. And, you know, you could find all the main companies working on the projects like the architects and the builders and the environmental consultants, you know, you can find all of those company names. You could maybe get project timelines and plans, names of the key project officers, you could get like their links with the council and their like local coordinator. You could, you know, they'll show you how you can sign up for newsletters about the project. Like, yeah, it's definitely really worth looking in detail. For example, one of the mega prisons that people have been fighting in the Northeast. The land is actually previously used to store nuclear weapons and has never been remediated officially. So if we hadn't have read the planning application in detail, we'd never have had that as a kind of like tool in the campaigns tool kit to fight the project. 

There's also government trading arms. So the state will have like different trading arms for specific purposes. So one of them is One3One Solutions, these guys here and they manage prison labor for the whole of the UK. So they have their own website, they used to publish like this kind of overview of companies and their contracts. They've kind of stopped doing that now but you could probably get it with a freedom of information requests. And yeah, that's really useful again, looking at these kind of like quasi government organizations, these quangos. 

And then government data. So people are obsessed with data. So this is the government data websites. So they're published like just literally all sorts of stuff. So let's have a look. Crime and justice. So we've got conditional cautioning data, successful prosecutions, European arrest warrants statistics, like again, always revisit your goals and decide what you're really looking for and stick to that. But yeah, it's amazing like what they have data on, things that we think are just like inherently oppressive and why the hell would you wanna document that the state are like very happy to keep a record of it. Office For National Statistics. Again, I think I open the website here. So maybe I'll click on it now, let's see how long it takes to load. All right, here we go, I know it's here, yeah. Office of National Statistics. So this is where you might kind of find your like broader information. So we've got here, our unemployment rate and things like inflation, GDP, population. With the COVID-19 pandemic, this is where they'll kind of track people that have been dying which is a bit grim, but yeah, tons of like information on there that can be useful to campaigns. 

So the state also has these kinds of inspector bodies that are doing inspections and kind of auditing different government services. So people that work in education, one of Ofsted, so this is the Office for Standards in Education. And maybe you remember at school when your teachers are just like running around stress because Ofsted are coming in. You know, like there's also a Care Inspectorate that is meant to inspect like care homes and kind of care institutions. And then there's yeah, the HMP Inspectorates, so the ones working at prisons. So again, like when I'm doing research I'm piecing together information from these different sources. So I'm looking at previous inspection reports of prisons. You know, if for example a new contract has gone to G4S or something we can look and see like when that prison last had an inspection and okay, look, six people killed themselves in this prison, and that will be in the inspector's report. And when we were researching this new children's prison or not a new one but one that was getting a new charity to run it. You could look on there and you could see the inspection of like the previous prison and the kind of health issues and the abuse incidents and the violence incidents that were kind of logged by the inspectors. 

The land registry. So again, we all know how important property is to capitalism and yep. The state have also mapped all of that out. So if you want to find out who owns property, the boundaries of a property, that's all available online with Her Majesty's Land Registry, you have to pay. So I'm not sure what the current fees are but they also have this kind of like paid for portal. So you can search for like business ownership but we we've got a, you know, we pay a subscription to this service. So if you ever need something looking up for a campaign we could do that with corporate watch. And then there's also local government websites. So, so far I've just been talking about like central government but local authorities will have their own data. They'll have their own news or events where, you know, they might publish like useful information for campaigns. 

The competition and markets authority. So they, so hang on. I think it's easier if I show you the website. So here we're looking at different, like basically different mergers. Like I said before, they don't want to create a world where one company has a monopoly on something 'cause you know, allegedly when you have a free market it's all about competition and that makes things more competitive and all of that stuff. But here you can see like, you know, different mergers Facebook and Giphy, anti virus software, like, you know, it's not just about mergers, but it's also about kind of new things affecting capitalism, so to speak. So, and again, like utilize the tool bar so got little case type here. So we've got criminal cartels, mergers, regulatory references and appeals. You can see if things already been closed or if it's currently open you can search by sector, which is quite useful. And you can see what's kind of been imposed by the state, if that makes sense. Yeah, and links to most of these are on the corporate watch website from our DIY guide. So there's some government and parliament sources here. There's information on public procurement and privatization. And there's also international institutions which I haven't gone into, but there's a lot of similar kind of government bodies on international scales. And then these databases were actually produced by David White, who is a member of the corporate watch advisory group and he taught a summer school with us a couple of years ago and shared lots of really useful resources. 

So these are some other databases that you can check out. So the Financial Conduct Authority. So you might be able to see if a company has kind of broken the law or acted like badly financially. You can look at serious fraud office cases, European Commission competition and cartel enforcement. So again, you might be looking at kind of corruption and stuff. Food Standards Agency, The Environment Agency, Health and Safety Executive. So I'm gonna be talking about this actually more in a later lesson. Gangmasters and Labor Abuse Authority. Unfortunately there's no database but you can see like a list of prosecutions. Employment tribunal judgements. So potentially if you're union or you're organizing with workers somehow you might see if a company is already been through like an employment tribunal with like previous employees, for example. And then these are a couple of legal databases and then these are some useful international sources. So the Business and Human Rights Centre they've done a lot of work looking at how companies use things like migrant labor. So I did a profile once on this construction company called Mace and who were at the time building a mega prison and this Business and Human Rights Centre had already mapped out some of their connections to migrant labor in Qatar, I think. I might be wrong on that, but I'm pretty sure like I definitely used that database. I think I haven't had a call with someone that worked there. And then, oh no maybe it was Lenleys anyway, doesn't matter. Yeah a couple of these are international arbitration database. So again, if you're interested in any legal things. 

Okay, so that's it on this session. 
Again, practical, practical, practical, have a practice, look at some of these websites, you know, depending on the issue you're researching or the company you're researching to see what you can find, check out a few of the links, see if the state have published kind of any relevant news regarding the thing you're organizing around. Maybe check out some of these legal databases, if there's any, you know, what's the relevant in spectra in your industry, but yeah. Add it to your mind map or your document and yeah, I'll see you in the next lesson.