Senra Radar vs Modern.Gov: which one do you actually need?

Every few months I get the same email from a new councillor: “My council uses Modern.Gov already. Do I need Radar as well?” It is a fair question, because both tools sit somewhere in the broad category of “councillor digital stuff.” The short answer is that they solve completely different problems. This is what each one actually does.

What Modern.Gov is

Modern.Gov is a democratic-services platform, made by a company called Modern Networks, used by roughly 80% of English councils. It is what your council uses to publish meeting agendas, cabinet papers, minutes, decisions, and the register of councillor interests. When you click on “Calendar of meetings” on your council’s website, you are almost always looking at a Modern.Gov instance.

It is excellent at the job it was designed for: making the formal democratic process of a council publicly accessible. Agendas appear roughly a week before each meeting. Minutes are usually published within a fortnight. Papers attached to cabinet decisions are downloadable. Divisions and voting records are logged.

If you are a scrutiny officer, a researcher, a journalist covering local government, or a resident trying to understand how your council makes decisions, Modern.Gov is genuinely indispensable. It replaced the old model of having to request paper agendas in person.

What Modern.Gov does not do

Modern.Gov publishes what the council produces internally. It does not publish:

• Planning applications on your ward’s streets (that is usually a separate IDOX portal).
• Street issue reports from residents.
• Police-recorded crime data mapped to your ward.
• Sold house prices.
• Food hygiene ratings.
• Energy performance ratings.
• Road traffic accident data.
• Licensing data at property level.
• Stop-and-search records.

These sources are all public but they are all published by different bodies: your council, the Home Office, the Land Registry, the Food Standards Agency, the Department for Transport, and so on. Modern.Gov does not aggregate them because aggregating them is not what it was built for.

What Senra Radar is

Radar aggregates those eleven public data sources and clips them to the exact polygon of each ward. It is designed for the second category of councillor work: the bit that sits outside the formal council process and lives on the doorstep, in surgeries, and in ward newsletters.

When a resident asks you about vehicle crime on their street, Modern.Gov will not help. When you need to know which planning applications are live in your ward this week, Modern.Gov will not help. When you want to understand the profile of a street before you knock on its doors, Modern.Gov will not help. Those are the situations Radar is built for.

When to use which

You need to…	Use
Read the papers before a cabinet meeting	Modern.Gov
Check how a specific councillor voted on a motion	Modern.Gov
Find a minute from a scrutiny panel three months ago	Modern.Gov
Look up the register of interests for a colleague	Modern.Gov
See planning applications in your ward this week	Radar
Check whether street issue reports are clustering	Radar
Read crime data for a specific street before canvassing	Radar
Identify F and G rated rental properties in your ward	Radar
Pull a CSV of recent property sales	Radar

Does one replace the other

No. They are different layers of the job. A councillor who uses only Modern.Gov understands council decisions but has no outside-the-chamber picture of their ward. A councillor who uses only Radar has a clear picture of their ward but is underprepared for committee votes. You need both for different days of the week.

If you have been told “you already have Modern.Gov, you do not need another tool,” the person saying it is describing the formal process side of the role. That is real but it is not the whole role. The outside-the-chamber side is where most residents actually meet you.