Councils on the map

• We check every council against the same list of tracked actions — specific things a council could do about food, such as putting a plant-based option on every school menu.
• A council only gets credit for a decision written into its own minutes. A press release, a pledge or a strategy document is not enough on its own.
• Some actions count for more than others. One that cuts more emissions, or does more for food supply or fairness, is weighted above a symbolic gesture.

The impact score is a running total: we add up the weight of every tracked action the council has formally acted on. It is not a percentage and not a mark out of 100, so there is no top score to reach.

A higher total means the council has acted on more actions, or on weightier ones. A lower one can mean it voted things down, let them stall, or kept to smaller measures — but it can equally mean we have found less on its record. It does not say whether anything was then delivered.

Two councils on the same total can behave quite differently, so read it beside the behaviour label next to each name. Each council’s own page shows the average per action, the wording we relied on, and which meeting every decision came from.

We read council minutes by machine, so we miss some decisions and misread others. Anything we show can be traced back to the document it came from.