Council gateway aims to make local government decisions accessible. It is an open API that makes UK council records searchable across every local authority at once, indexing 1.59 million public documents.
A searchable index of public documents
UK local government produces a huge volume of public record including council minutes, committee decisions, planning papers, these public records are scattered across hundreds of individual council websites, difficult to find and rarely read by the people it affects.
Council Gateway is a pipeline that ingests public documents from UK local authorities at scale, then classifies and summarises them with LLMs so dense committee papers become readable to members of the public. It sits behind a token-authenticated, read-only API, so other tools can query the data directly rather than scraping the same councils themselves.
It currently indexes 1.59 million public documents. More than 20 platforms have been built on top of it.
Built for residents who want to know what their council is doing, journalists and researchers working across many councils at once, and developers building their own tools on a public dataset that used to be locked inside individual council sites.
