About Local Record

Every council in Wales publishes its meetings, agendas, reports and minutes. Most use a system called ModernGov, which also offers the same information as open data. Local Record reads that data every day.

Councillors, wards, committees, meeting dates, attendance and the papers for each meeting come straight from the council. Nothing is estimated. If the council hasn't published something, Local Record says so.

Councils don't publish a word-for-word record of what is said in meetings. Instead they publish minutes: a short official record of what each meeting decided. Once the minutes are out, Local Record uses AI to explain each decision and the reasons given for it in plain English and Welsh. Before then, for the main meetings, it explains what the reports on the agenda propose, and says plainly that nothing has been decided yet.

The AI is given only that meeting's minutes and reports. It is told to state a decision only when the minutes record one, and every item links to the documents it was written from. Any sentence with a number or a name that can't be found in those papers is removed automatically. Summaries can still contain mistakes, so the official papers are always one click away.

Summaries cover meetings of the full Council, the Cabinet, scrutiny committees and planning committees back to May 2022, where Local Record holds them, and other committees' meetings from the last year. There is a monthly spending limit, so a few meetings may wait for a summary.

When councillors declare an interest at a meeting, the minutes record it. Local Record reads those declarations from the minutes and links each one to the councillor when the name matches exactly one councillor.

Local Record covers all 22 Welsh councils, but not every part of every council's record is complete yet. Meeting history goes back to May 2022 for some councils and only a few weeks for others. Some councils' websites block downloads of their reports, so their summaries rest on the minutes alone. Where a council's councillors or meetings haven't loaded, its pages say so.