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AUTONOMY CONSULTANTS – B0007970 – HI RES – COPYRIGHT MATT STRONGE
Democracy and transparency

Many new digital technologies present novel challenges to transparency – but they also offer opportunities for greater democratic and investigative scrutiny too.

The Autonomy Institute is using advanced technology to help researchers, journalists, and progressive organisations carry out investigative work with greater efficiency, depth and precision.

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Tools for transparency

Six degrees of Reform: Mapping the corporate connections of the UK’s entrepreneurial populist right

What does Reform UK’s extended corporate network look like?

Reform UK brands itself as an “entrepreneurial political start-up” with multi-millionaire real-estate tycoon and party chairman Richard Tice advocating for more business leaders to engage in politics and improve how the country is run.

Prompted by Reform’s claims to entrepreneurship we ask: What British companies have Reform’s leadership and their extended network started-up over the past decade?

We conducted an analysis of Companies House data, identifying notable companies established since 2014 in proximity to Reform. From this data, we created a network map to illustrate the connections of each company to the political party.

How has Arts Council funding around the UK changed since 2014?

In collaboration with the Equity union, we analysed how Arts Council funding has changed across the UK’s parliamentary constituencies from 2010 to 2023, building a tool to provide insights for stakeholders looking to understand and advocate for equitable arts funding.

We processed data from each of the UK’s arts councils, with their own time span and geographical boundaries. We then proceeded to harmonise these datasets to produce aggregated arts funding time-series for each UK Westminster constituency (2024 boundaries)

The tool allows for high resolution and comparative analysis of the funding situation round the UK for the last decade.

UK Arts Funding Tracker

Politics for sale: analysing twenty-one years of UK political donations

Where does influence lie in Westminster?

Our report provides unprecedented analysis of political donations in the UK over a twenty-one year period, drawing on a newly-constructed dataset that combines the official data on political donations published by the Electoral Commission with data from Companies House, Wikidata and the Parliamentary API data.

Having identified and addressed a number of issues with the Electoral Commission data, and augmented it with other data sources, the new dataset allows for a much more comprehensive picture of donation activity than has been possible with previous data.

Where are the UK’s ‘dark kitchens’?

With a lack of detailed data on the growth and current state of dark kitchens across the UK, we set out to create a snapshot of Deliveroo’s dark kitchen facilities, known as ‘Editions’, mapping their distribution around the country.

Dark kitchens are dedicated sites for preparing delivery-only takeaway meals; a model that has been widely adopted across the food service industry throughout the past decade. The sites are often located in well-connected non-residential urban locations where overhead and operating costs are reduced. Many restaurants have successfully embraced this service model, allowing them to untether and optimise their delivery business from in-house.

A better understanding of the successes and failures of dark kitchens could provide insights relevant to economic planning, risk management, urban design and food distribution.

Dark Kitchen Cartography

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Our research