Civil Rights

Rivermont’s council uses at least eleven automated or semi-automated systems that produce a decision about a resident: housing allocation priority, school place appeals, parking enforcement review, benefit eligibility triage and seven others. Until 2024, no list of them existed.

We know there are eleven because volunteers submitted information requests to every department and counted.

The register

The register the district adopted in 2024 requires, for each system:

• What it decides, and for whom.
• What data it uses.
• Who supplied it, and what it cost.
• How a resident asks for the reasoning behind a decision that affected them.

Four of the eleven systems are now fully described. The other seven are listed with the note “description pending”, which has been pending for eighteen months.

What still needs to change

1. A deadline. A system that cannot be described within ninety days should not be in use.
2. A right to reasons, in writing, within twenty working days — the same deadline that applies to any other request.
3. No new system without a register entry first. Describe it, then buy it.

If nobody in the building can explain how a decision was reached, the building has not made a decision. It has deferred one.

The work

Information requests, one department at a time, filed by volunteers and published in full. It is slow and it is the only method that has worked.