Methodology

How red flags are determined on Cornwall Political Watch.

Our approach

Red flags on this site are generated algorithmically from publicly available council data. No editorial judgement is applied to the detection process. Every flag is the result of a data point crossing a pre-defined threshold.

The purpose of this system is to surface patterns that warrant public attention, not to make accusations. A red flag indicates that a data point has met a specific condition — there may be legitimate reasons for the underlying behaviour.

Flags are reviewed periodically. When the underlying condition is no longer met (for example, attendance improves above the threshold), the flag is automatically resolved and removed from the active list.

Low Attendance

A low attendance flag is raised when a councillor's attendance falls below 60%. This threshold applies in two ways:

Overall attendance — the councillor's attendance across all committees and meetings is below 60%.
Individual committee attendance — the councillor's attendance on any single committee they are a member of is below 60%.

Attendance is calculated as the number of meetings where the councillor was marked as “present” divided by the total number of meetings held for which they had attendance recorded. Apologies and absences are both counted as non-attendance for the purposes of this calculation.

The 60% threshold was chosen because Cornwall Council's own rules require members to attend at least one meeting in a six-month period to avoid disqualification. Our threshold is set higher to reflect a reasonable expectation of regular participation.

Conflict of Interest Votes

A conflict of interest flag is raised when a councillor has voted on a decision where they had a declared interest. This is determined by the hasInterest field on the vote record, which indicates the councillor had formally declared an interest in the matter being decided.

Under the council's code of conduct, members with a disclosable pecuniary interest should not participate in discussion or vote on the matter. This flag identifies instances where a vote was recorded despite a declared interest.

It is possible that a dispensation was granted, or that the nature of the interest did not require withdrawal. This flag surfaces the data point for public scrutiny — it does not imply wrongdoing.

Expense Outlier

This flag type is planned for future implementation. It will identify councillors whose expenses are significantly above the median for their role. Details of the calculation method will be published here when the feature is launched.

Data sources

Attendance data — scraped from Cornwall Council's Modern.gov portal, which publishes attendance records for all public meetings.
Voting records — extracted from published meeting minutes and decision records on Modern.gov.
Interest declarations — recorded alongside votes where the councillor's declared interest status is published.

Update frequency

Red flag detection runs periodically after new council data is scraped. Flags are automatically resolved when the underlying condition is no longer met. The date each flag was first detected is displayed alongside the flag entry.

Image sources

Photographs used on this site are sourced from openly licensed or free-to-use platforms. The following sources are approved for use:

Source	Licence	Best for	Attribution
Wikimedia Commons	CC BY-SA 4.0 / Public Domain	County Hall, landmarks, town centres	Yes (CC BY-SA). Not needed for Public Domain.
Geograph	CC BY-SA 2.0	Ward-specific locations, villages, streets	Yes. Format: © [Author], cc-by-sa/2.0
Unsplash	Unsplash Licence (free)	Generic Cornwall coastal/moorland landscapes	No (but appreciated)
Pexels	Pexels Licence (free)	Generic landscape fallbacks	No
Flickr Creative Commons	CC BY / CC BY-SA	Cornwall landmarks, events, varied subjects	Yes for CC BY-SA
Own photographs	Full ownership	Anything	No

Image attributions

The following third-party images are used on this site and require attribution under their respective licences.