Data Export of Council Meetings

One-off bulk export of council meeting documents for academic and policy research. We deliver structured, machine-readable archives of meeting minutes, agendas, and report packs from the councils and date range you specify, where available, ready for text analysis, NLP pipelines, and longitudinal study.

Coverage reaches back to 2010, varying by council.

Built for researchers who need a reproducible corpus of local government activity, not a live subscription.

What You Get

📄 Page-Level Text Extraction

Every available minutes, agenda, and report pack page as a row, with extracted text, source URL, and OCN meeting URL. Load directly into pandas, DuckDB, Polars, or Spark.

🔗 Stable IDs

Every row has a stable page_id, document_id, and meeting_id so re-exports are diffable and results are reproducible.

📊 JSONL + Parquet

Gzipped JSONL per council, plus a single ZSTD-compressed Parquet file across all councils for heavy analytical workloads.

📚 Manifest and Schema

Delivery includes manifest.json (councils, coverage, failure counts), schema.json, and README.md.

📖 Citable

BibTeX and plain-text citation blocks included. Every row links to source documents so every claim is traceable.

🗂️ Explicit Failures List

The manifest shows which documents could not be retrieved so gaps are visible, not hidden.

Every export is a standalone archive. You do not need to integrate with any OCN system to use it.

Typical Use Cases

Academic Research

Studying local government decision-making, planning policy, or democratic participation at scale

Policy Research

Building longitudinal evidence bases for think tanks and policy organisations

Text Analysis

Running NLP, topic modelling, or sentiment analysis on council meeting corpora

Historical Analysis

Cross-meeting, cross-council analysis that a live subscription does not serve

Licensing

Our license for the database covers a single named research project with up to three named researchers associated with an academic or research institution.

The council documents in the export remain subject to each council's original terms. Most UK council meeting materials are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, but verify licensing for your chosen councils if redistribution is planned.

Pricing

£450 + VAT setup and delivery fee, plus £20 + VAT per council in scope.

Example: an export covering Camden and Islington from 2010 to present costs £490 + VAT.

Raw PDF originals, media transcripts, and AI-generated summaries of historic meetings are optional paid add-ons, quoted per engagement.

Ongoing query access to the delivered data within OCN (via Professional plan or Council Data API) is not included in this fee. Most researchers use the export offline in their own analysis environment.

Citing This Dataset

When you publish work using OCN data, please cite the export. The <project_id> placeholder below will be filled in at delivery; the year is the delivery year.

Plain Text
Open Council Network. (2026). Council Meetings Document Export: <project_id> [Data set]. Open Council Network. https://opencouncil.network/about/researchers/data-export
BibTeX
@dataset{ocn_council_export_2026,
  author    = {{Open Council Network}},
  title     = {Council Meetings Document Export: <project_id>},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Open Council Network},
  url       = {https://opencouncil.network/about/researchers/data-export}
}

Coverage and Constraints

OCN covers 175+ councils in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

  • Many council archives run from around 2010 to present, though exact coverage varies by council.
  • Expect a 10-20% failure rate for pre-2015 material (councils remove or move content).
  • PDF, DOC, and DOCX formats are supported. .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx, and .rtf are currently unsupported.
  • Documents removed from council websites cannot be recovered.
  • This is a snapshot export. Delta / incremental exports are not included.

Start Your Research Project

Email us with your research questions, the councils you're interested in, and your time range. We'll confirm scope, send you a sample dataset, and schedule delivery.

Get in touch