Senra Radar vs the councillor spreadsheet you have been updating by hand

If you are an engaged councillor, there is roughly an 80% chance you have built your own spreadsheet at some point. A tab for live planning applications. A tab for open street reports on the ones residents have mentioned. A tab for casework. A tab for the crime figures you copied out of police.uk last month.

I have seen versions of this spreadsheet from councillors in a dozen different parties and boroughs. They almost always look similar. They almost always stop being updated sometime between month two and month four. This is a fair look at why that happens and what the alternative is.

What the DIY spreadsheet is good at

Before arguing against it, it is worth being honest about what the self-built spreadsheet does well.

• It is shaped exactly to your ward. You can structure the columns how you want, ignore the data types you do not care about, and add free-text notes where you need to.
• It builds genuine familiarity with the sources. A councillor who has manually copied planning references from IDOX for six months knows what every field means. That knowledge compounds.
• It is free. A shared Google Sheet or Airtable base costs nothing.
• It is portable. If you are standing down or switching parties, you can take your spreadsheet with you.

None of these are small. If your spreadsheet is working for you and you enjoy maintaining it, there is no requirement to switch tools.

Where the DIY spreadsheet breaks down

The reason these spreadsheets go stale is structural, not personal. Three specific failures happen in this order:

Week one to four: keeping up with data volume

A ward with even moderate planning activity generates 5 to 20 new applications per month. Street issue reports on FixMyStreet are 10 to 50 per month. Crime records are similar. Stop-and-search, food hygiene, property sales, EPC, road accidents, planned roadworks: even at low volume, the total across eleven sources is several hundred rows a month.

The manual copy-paste workflow works for the first few weeks because the novelty carries you through. By week four, it is one of the chores you are putting off.

Month two to three: dealing with updates

Planning applications change status. Street reports get closed or marked fixed. Crime data from two months ago arrives. These are not new rows; they are updates to existing rows. Keeping a spreadsheet accurate means also going back and editing what is already in it, not just appending.

This is where most spreadsheets silently decay. Nobody explicitly decides to stop; the “reconcile the status column” task just keeps getting pushed to next week.

Month three onwards: boundary accuracy

Postcodes do not map cleanly to ward boundaries. A postcode sector can straddle two wards. If your spreadsheet is filtered by postcode, it will quietly include streets in the neighbouring ward and miss streets in yours. You will not notice until a resident points it out.

Doing this properly requires the actual polygon boundary from the Office for National Statistics, point-in-polygon checks for every record, and updates when boundaries change after a boundary review. That is not something a spreadsheet is designed to do.

What Radar does instead

Radar handles the three failure points above automatically.

• Data volume: polled every 6 hours, automatically. Ten sources, for every ward it covers. No copy-paste.
• Updates: re-reads each source and updates status, closure dates, and case notes in place. You see the current state, not the state when you last checked.
• Boundary accuracy: clips every record to the actual ONS ward polygon, not a postcode approximation. Border cases are handled correctly.

The trade-off is that Radar has the shape of Radar, not the shape of your ward’s particular concerns. If your casework focus is renters’ rights, Radar will not have a bespoke “renters” tab. It will have the EPC rating data that underpins renters’ rights casework, but you still need to form the narrative.

The honest middle ground

Most councillors I have talked to who use both end up with a simple split: Radar for the raw data, a short personal spreadsheet or note system for the narrative on top. Radar tells you there are four open FixMyStreet reports on Park Road. Your note system tells you which resident raised which one at last month’s surgery.

This is the right shape, because the data layer and the narrative layer are different jobs. A tool that tries to do both usually ends up doing neither well.

When the DIY approach is still correct

Three situations where you should keep the spreadsheet.

• You are covering a ward Radar does not yet cover. Radar is live across seven London boroughs (Hammersmith & Fulham, Havering, Hounslow, Sutton, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth and Westminster), with more added each month. If your ward is outside that list, a spreadsheet is currently your only option.
• You are tracking something very specific that is not in any of the ten standard sources. Parish council meetings, say, or a specific community consultation. Radar cannot help you with those; a spreadsheet can.
• You genuinely enjoy maintaining it. Spending an hour a week in a spreadsheet is a reasonable hobby for a councillor and there is nothing wrong with keeping it.