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Where Councils Stand Sourced briefings on the record of councils across the UK A Where They Stand project

How it works

Where Councils Stand reads the minutes councils already publish, and writes briefings in which every point cites those minutes.

Where the record comes from

Most councils in the UK publish their meetings through one of three systems: Modern.gov and CMIS, both made by Civica, and CoINS, made by Northgate. Where Councils Stand reads all three. Each Modern.gov site has a public web service that gives every meeting's agenda, the minutes of each item, and the councillors listed at the meeting with their party on the day. CMIS and CoINS sites have no such service, so their public pages are read as a browser would read them. Each council is sent one request at a time, at least a second apart (longer if its site asks), by a reader that names itself, and a copy is kept so that each meeting is fetched once. A site that refuses these requests is asked for permission, never worked around.

It covers full council and cabinet meetings since May 2018, including annual, budget and extraordinary meetings. Councils run by committees, which have no cabinet, are covered through the committees that make their main policy and budget decisions, usually a policy and resources committee. Other committees, cabinet members' individual decisions, and planning and licensing are not included.

Where a council publishes a meeting's minutes only as a document, the document is read instead. Some councils' sites refuse automated requests for documents, so some meetings have no minutes here. The list of councils shows which councils are covered, and why the rest aren't yet.

The record is brought up to date every night. New meetings are added, and minutes from the last four months are read again, because minutes can change until they are approved at the next meeting.

Strategic authorities

England's strategic authorities (combined authorities, combined county authorities and the Greater London Authority) take decisions on transport, skills, housing and investment across several councils. The site covers those whose meetings are published through Modern.gov: their board (called the combined authority, the board or the cabinet), including budget meetings, their overview and scrutiny committees, and the mayor's decisions where the meetings system publishes them, from May 2018 or the authority's creation. Each authority's page gives its kind, its constituent councils and its mayors, and each council's page says which authority it is part of. The list says which are covered, and why the rest aren't yet.

A strategic authority isn't run by a party. Where it has a mayor, the mayor's party on the date is shown in its place, always labelled as the mayor's ("Mayor: Labour"), and briefings group authorities by their mayor's party, never together with councils under a party's control. One without a mayor has no single party: its members are appointed by its councils, each with the same say. In a briefing, each authority counts as one body, like a council.

Board members are mostly council leaders, appointed by their councils. Each is shown with their role (the mayor, a constituent or non-constituent council's member, a substitute or a co-opted member) and their party on the date, taken from their own council's record where the site has it, and otherwise from the authority's. Only councillors and the mayor are named: appointed members who aren't councillors, such as a business board's chair, are counted but not named.

What minutes are, and aren't

Minutes are a summary of a meeting written by the council's officers, not a word-for-word record. Briefings therefore say what the minutes record, and never present the minutes' summary as a councillor's own words. Quotations are only ever of words in the minutes.

Party on the date, and party in control

Each meeting's list of councillors records each councillor's party at the time, so a councillor who changed party is shown with the party they had at each meeting. Councils label parties in many ways ("LAB", "Labour", "Lab & Co-op"). These are mapped to one name per party, partly by rules and partly from Open Council Data's lists of councillors. Named local groups of independents or residents count as local parties, each under its own name, not as "Independent".

A party is in overall control when it has more than half the councillors listed at a full council meeting. Otherwise the council is under no overall control. This is reported as the council recorded it, as a fact about the date, never as a judgement. For strategic authorities, see above.

Named votes

When a council takes a recorded vote, the minutes list who voted for, against and abstained. Councils write these lists in at least nine different ways. Each name is matched to the councillors listed at the meeting, so each vote shows every councillor's party on the date. Names that can't be matched are shown as written.

The reading has been checked by hand against the minutes: 300 named votes, drawn at random in three samples of 100. The first sample found 9 votes with a councillor on the wrong side. After the reading was fixed, the second and third found 2 each, every time from a way of writing the list not seen before. Those are now read correctly or left out. A vote is also left out when the names read don't match a count printed in the minutes, or when it puts one councillor on two sides.

Even so, expect about 1 vote in 100 to have a councillor on the wrong side. That is accepted while the site is in alpha, and it is being worked on: before the beta, a fixed set of checked votes will be built, so that every change to the reading is tested against it. If only one side of a vote could be read, the page says so. Each vote links to the council's own minutes, so you can check it, and please report any mistake you find.

How a briefing is written

  1. The question is read into filters: dates, councils, the party in control, kinds of meeting. By default the last four years are searched. Ask about earlier years to go back to May 2018. The filters used are shown above the briefing.
  2. The minutes are searched, both by keyword and by meaning, using a model that runs on the site's own server.
  3. The evidence is balanced. The passages found are grouped by the party in overall control of each council on the date (a strategic authority by its mayor's party, in a group of its own), and drawn from each group in turn, at most two from any one council or authority. The same rules apply to every party.
  4. A briefing is written by an AI model, Claude (made by Anthropic), only from those passages. It is told to report what the minutes record, in neutral words. Each point cites the passage it comes from.
  5. The briefing is checked. Every citation is checked against its passage, and quotations against the minutes. Text that no source supports is marked, and loaded words in the model's own voice are flagged.

If the minutes hold nothing relevant, the briefing says "No records found." rather than guessing. Briefings can still be wrong. Please check the sources, and tell us if something is wrong.

People who aren't councillors

Minutes also name members of the public (people who speak, ask questions, present petitions, apply for planning permission or object) and council staff. Briefings and pages are limited to councillors' own words and actions. Other people's names are replaced with "[name removed]" before anything is searched, shown or sent to the AI model, and roles are kept ("[name removed], Chief Executive"). The council's own record is unchanged; it remains the council's responsibility. If you are named and something should not be shown, ask for it to be removed.

Code and data

The code is open source (AGPL-3.0) on GitHub, with the decisions behind it and the results of every check.