Join us on Tuesday 1 October for Digging the Data: MPs, Councillors and Elections where we’ll be exploring the fascinating world of political representation in the UK. Register here.

The July election brought big changes across the UK, as did the local elections before them in May. But what data is out there about our political representatives, and what can this data show us?

This post introduces some of the resources out here, as well as introducing some work we’ve been doing to make more data openly available. We have focussed on England, where we are based.

How do we know who’s in charge?

Simply put, the results of elections are added up in local areas and a ‘returning officer’ who is responsible for making sure everything is done correctly, reports the results. Local councils publish these results on their websites, and the media also report on them (See: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-happens-when-the-polls-close/).

For members of parliament the results are also published by the house of commons library. And a list of current MPs is published on the parliament website.

When it comes to councillors it’s more complicated to get your hands on an up to date list for the whole UK. Each council publishes information about their own councillors, but these are not always in the same format. We think its important that anyone can access this information in an easy to use format, to help all of us understand who holds power where in the UK. We have been working on a project to help make this a reality.

What have we been up to?

Over the last few months we’ve been using support from the Manchester Statistical Society to open up more data about Councillors. This work is an updating of something we created a few years back.

In previous years we scraped details of current councillors from council websites across England. These datasets, and information about our method and the script used, are available on our github. (These were used to create the visulisation shown below).

This year we’ve not had to rely on scraping the data alone as Open Council Data have collated this data themselves and made it freely available. This has allowed us to focus more on exploring what can be done with the data, how to communicate trends, and how to interest more people in the data out there.

As part of this we are running a free evening event in Manchester to help people learn more about what data is out there on elected representatives and explore what they can do with the data. All are welcome. Click here for more details and tickets for the event on Tuesday 1st October.

Where have we got to so far?

We have published a freely available dataset of councillors across England linked to levels of deprivation. This combines data from Open Council Data and the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation.  Accompanying the dataset is information about how it was created and what is shows. We have also been experimenting with ways of showing these trends, such as the draft graph below. There will be more coming soon.

What else is out there?

There are handy sources of data out there, and some great examples of making this easy to explore:

• Democracy Club are a goldmine of data on elections and representatives. They compile a database of who is standing for election in all elections in the UK above parish level, and the results of these elections. This includes by-elections (which happen outside the usual cycle of elections). Using this to work out who is currently in power is a little complicated and we hear rumours they may be making this information easier to access in the future.
• Open Council Data, a site run by Lawson Data Services Ltd. have compiled freely available datasets of councillors across the UK after the May elections, going back several years.
• mySociety’s TheyWorkforYou is a great resource for finding out who your MP is, how they voted on issues that matter to you, and how to get in touch.
• The House of Commons library have created a nifty tool for exploring the relationship between the make-up of a local area and the party these places elect. They also have a dashboard for exploring data about parliamentary constituencies.
• For the election buffs, our friends at Open Innovations have created a hex map of the 2024 general elections results, with each constituency shown as an equal size. They have also shared resources for creating your own hex maps.
• And there is a lot of data these sources can be linked up with. For example, census data includes everything from religion to the location of second homes. And the English Indices of Deprivation included data on a range of measures, as well as an overall score and rank (there are different measures for other nations in the UK).

We will be exploring some of these resources (and others) at our event on the 1st October, making connections between data and each other, and seeing what we can find out and create. If you’d like to learn more then come along.

Not based nearby but want to connect about the work we are doing? Do drop us an email at hello@opendatamanchester.org.uk or you can sign up to our monthly newsletter.

To keep it up to date we may add in some more resources over time. If there is something great we’ve missed then let us know.