What Powers Council Websites

Council Data is a public directory of local government website technology across the UK and Ireland. It covers 274 councils and tracks the CMS each site runs, the analytics tool it uses, and the cookie consent manager it has in place. The underlying data lives in a public GitHub repo as a single clean JSON file, free to download, fork, or build on.

What the repo is for

The GitHub repo contains council-data.json: one file, 274 records, each with a council name, country, homepage URL, CMS details, analytics provider, and cookie consent manager. That's it. No login, no API key, no rate limit.

The data is built from publicly available website signals. It is not exhaustive and will not be perfect, but it is a starting point that does not currently exist anywhere in this form.

What people can build with it is the more interesting question. A few obvious ones (which we will begin building soon):

Accessibility and performance dashboards.

Pipe the council URLs through Lighthouse or WAVE, join the results back to the dataset, and you have a ranked view of how the sector performs on Core Web Vitals, accessibility scores, or both. Do it on a schedule and you have a tracker that shows improvement or decline over time.

CMS migration intelligence.

If you work in local government technology and want to know which councils are on legacy platforms and likely to be considering a move, the data gives you a clear list. Filter by CMS, by country, by analytics tool. The picture is there.

Open data portals for transparency.

Any council, sector body, or digital team that wants to publish a "state of local government digital" report now has a dataset to hang it off. A simple HTML page using the JSON as a source could give councillors, journalists, or residents a view of what their local authority is running.

Vendor and platform comparisons.

Which councils share the same CMS? Which analytics tools are most common in Wales versus England? The data makes those questions answerable without a research project.

Design quality and standards tracking.

Combined with something like a design standards checklist or the GOV.UK Design System, the repo becomes a basis for tracking how many councils meet shared standards and which platforms tend to produce compliant results.

Why we made it public

We could have kept this as internal research. But that would have made it less useful, including to us.

A public repo gets better data faster. If a council's entry is wrong, someone can file an issue or a pull request. A closed spreadsheet does not do that.

It also fits how The Confident works. We have contributed open-source modules, design systems, and tooling to the LocalGov Drupal community for years. A public dataset of the technology landscape that community operates in felt like the same kind of thing.

What's next

The data will be updated. The current snapshot is from August 2026. We plan to automate updates and expand the fields tracked over time, starting with performance scores and design system adoption.

If you want to explore the data now, the directory is at council-data.the-confident.com. If you want to build something with it or improve the underlying data, the repo is at github.com/the-confident/council-data.

If you build something interesting on top of it, let us know.