How to follow Town Deal and housing papers

The papers live on the council

Town Deal boards, town boards, and neighbourhood boards publish through the council that hosts them, when they publish at all. On this index those files are papers of that council. There is no separate national Town Deal catalogue. A search for the words Town Deal finds titles on the councils that used those words.

A board minute is a minute. It is not a funding database, not a contract register, and not a list of every project in England. If the council did not publish the pack, we do not invent the pack. Council minutes is the same rule for Cabinet.

Housing associations that we track as bodies have their own pages, with their own paper counts. A housing association is not the council, even when the council nominates board members. Read the body name on the page before you merge the two.

A board is not a national list

Seventy-odd councils already have papers titled Town Deal or Town Board on this index. That is a count of papers we hold, not a league table of towns. One council can have many papers. Another town can have a board and no file here. No file means we do not hold the file. It does not mean the board never met.

Regeneration reports, grant letters, and cabinet decisions about a town fund are still council papers. File them under the council that published them. Do not create a second source for the deal.

A company named in a Town Deal paper is a name in a paper, unless the paper prints a company number. Company numbers applies here exactly as it does on a procurement minute.

A worked example

Open Sefton Council. Look at titles. If a paper says Town Deal, Town Board, or Neighbourhood Board, it is a Sefton paper. The count on the Sefton page includes it. There is not a second Sefton Town Deal body to open.

Open Birmingham City Council the same way. Birmingham's papers are Birmingham's. Do not expect Sefton's board pack to appear on Birmingham's page because both towns had a deal.

The Sources catalogue is how you move from one council to another. Methodology is why we do not add a body until it has a papers page of its own.

What this is not

If you are following one town, stay on that council until the titles run out. Then stop. Opening a neighbouring council because the project 'must' have been discussed there is a guess. The neighbouring council's papers are about that council. A combined authority, where we hold one, is a different body again, with its own page and its own count.

Housing association board papers, where the association is a tracked body, are that association's papers. A council nomination to the board does not move the association's PDF onto the council. Read the masthead. If the masthead is the association, cite the association. Town funds also sit inside ordinary cabinet papers that never use the words Town Deal in the filename. A report can be titled for a site, a grant, or a developer and still be the decision. Read the first page, not only the filename. If the first page is the council, it is the council. Filename search is how you find candidates. The PDF is how you decide what you found. When the candidate is on another council, it is a different town's paper until the text says otherwise. Do not assemble a national story by stacking filenames. Stack citations, and only the ones you opened. A housing paper on a council and a board paper on an association can describe the same street and still be two publishers. Cite both streets only after you have read both first pages. If you have read one, you have one. Say one. The catalogue will still be there when you have time for the second council. It does not reward speed. It rewards the file you can point to, with the body name still attached. Sefton stays Sefton. Birmingham stays Birmingham. The deal does not merge them.

It is not a judgement on a Town Deal project. It is not a complete set of every town fund document in the UK. It is the papers the councils published that we already hold.

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