Search local council decisions. Find what matters.
Visit Council Gateway →
Council Gateway is a prototype tool that helps campaigners, journalists, and citizens quickly search and understand what’s happening in local councils. It makes minutes and documents — often buried in PDFs — searchable and accessible, using large language models (LLMs) to summarise key information.
The idea came out of Campaign Lab’s hack nights, where volunteers started exploring how we could make local democracy more transparent. Early versions scraped a handful of councils and tested whether we could pull useful information from long, jargon-heavy meeting notes.
Since then, the project has been developed further by Poteris, with support from Campaign Lab. It now covers 80% of councils, with plans to expand both historic coverage and search capabilities.
As more power is devolved locally — and as local newsrooms shrink — tools like this are essential for holding decision-makers to account and equipping campaigners with the information they need.