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Add all Town/Parish Councils to WhatDoTheyKnow
RichardTaylor opened this issue May 31, 2011
Probably well suited to be a volunteer task. Could be done via FOI requests to all council tax collecting councils asking for the list of Town/Parish councils in their area and a contact email.
Would probably need a some developer support for the bulk upload / checking for duplications etc.
bjh21 commented May 31, 2011 Almost all district councils have a list of parish councils (with email addresses) on their Web site, so for the most part this can be done with a quick scraper or 200. As an example, see http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/names_of_nhs_foundation_trusts_1/ (sorry about the silly URL -- what I get for saving the forked scraper before changing its name)
confirmordeny commented December 22, 2011 There are around 9,000 parish/town councils plus about 1,000 parish meetings in England alone. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/parish.htm
Coverage of town councils is already quite good: We already have 599 town councils [not all in England] http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/list/town_council - there are thought to be 591 in England
Coverage of all the parish councils is quite a big task but a worthwhile one.
Started listing these but doesn't look like its complete https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body?tag=parish_council
Try to gamify with a map showing progress.
Linked to: https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/3477
A volunteer has noted they believe we are currently comprehensive in:
Fenland, Huntingdonshire, Shropshire, West Suffolk, Cotswold, South Cambs, Nottinghamshire, Dacorum, North East Derbyshire, Peterborough, Sollihull, Waverley, West Berks and South Gloucestershire
Reportedly coverage of: Rutland, Kent and Medway, Merseyside, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Lancashire is now also comprehensive.
Cumbria, North Yorkshire, Isle of Wight, Essex, Oxfordshire and West Sussex also appear complete.
Is there a list of areas that we could create a checklist from in the initial comment in this issue?
I've been attempting to check what we have against a list of district councils to create one. From what I can tell, I think we have full coverage for 120+ districts and circa 150 left to go, if you exclude London. Some of the remaining districts will be unparished, so the real number will be smaller than that.
We are not currently comprehensive in North Northamptonshire, there is a list of town and parish clerk contacts in the district at:
https://www.east-northamptonshire.gov.uk/directory/9/town_and_parish_clerk_contacts
Perhaps the National Association of Local Councils might help, or might promote our service, if they're interested in encouraging people to take action on local issues:
https://www.nalc.gov.uk/makeachange
I've geotagged every town, parish and community council that we list in England and Wales. I've used the data to produce a table of our current coverage:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gPa5P1nlpaBhvj_6_-XLlQ6cku7RIUHegsy_YzeP2lA/edit?usp=sharing
Caveat - not every parish has a meeting/council, so we will be at full coverage for some areas when the figure is below 100% 95 councils could not be matched to a parish on mapit and so are not included in this data.
Copying from another issue: https://www.ceredigion.gov.uk/your-council/councillors-committees/town-and-community-councils/
Has this been done now? I had an idea there was a large-scale import done.
I got it up to 9,244, and there are just over 10,000 in total, so we can't say we have all of them yet. That might be enough coverage to close this off though - there were no contact details for most of the missing ones. I'd personally prioritise checking that the details we have are up to date before adding any more.