A first look at the council spending data: £10bn, 1.5m payments, 60,000 companies

Like buses, you wait ages for local councils to publish their spending data, then a whole load come at once… and consequently OpenlyLocal has been importing the data pretty much non-stop for the past month or so.

We’ve now imported spending data for over 140 councils with more being added each day, and now have over a million and a half payments to suppliers, totalling over £10 billion. I think it’s worth repeating that figure: Ten Billion Pounds, as it’s a decent chunk of change, by anybody’s measure (although it’s still only a fraction of all spending by councils in the country).

Along with that we’ve also made loads of improvements to the analysis and data, some visible, other not so much (we’ve made loads of much-needed back-end improvements now that we’ve got so much more data), and to mark breaking the £10bn figure I thought it was worth starting a series of posts looking at the spending dataset.

Let’s start by having a look at those headline figures (we’ll be delving deeper into the data for some more heavyweight data-driven journalism over the next few weeks):

144 councils. That’s about 40% of the 354 councils in England (including the GLA). Some of the others we just haven’t yet imported (we’re adding them at about 2 a day); others have problems with the CSV files they are publishing (corrupted or invalid files, or where there’s some query about the data itself), and where there’s a contact email we’ve notified them of this.

The rest are refusing to publish the CSV files specified in the guidelines, deciding to make it difficult to automatically import by publishing an Excel file or, worse, a PDF (and here I’d like to single out Birmingham council, the biggest in the UK, which shamefully is publishing it’s spending only as a PDF, and even then with almost no detail at all. One wonders what they are hiding).

£10,184,169,404 in 1,512,691 transactions. That’s an average transaction value of £6,732 per payment. However this is not uniform across councils, varying from an average transaction value of £669 for Poole to £46,466 for Barnsley. (In future posts, I’ll perhaps have a look at using the R statistical language to do some histograms on the data, although I’d be more than happy if someone beat me to that).

194,128 suppliers. What does this mean? To be accurate, this is the total number of supplying relationships between the councils and the companies/people/things they are paying.

Sometimes a council may have (or appear to have) several supplier relationships with the same company (charity/council/police authority), using different names or supplier IDs. This is sometimes down to a mistake in keying in the data, or for internal reasons, but either way it means several supplier records are created. It’s also worth noting that redacted payments are often grouped together as a single ‘supplier’, as the council may not have given any identifier to show that a redacted payment of £50,000 to a company (and in general there’s little reason to redact such payments) is to a different recipient than a redacted payment of £800 to a foster parent, for example.

However, using some clever matching and with the help of the increasing number of users who are matching suppliers to companies/charities and other entities on OpenlyLocal (just click on ‘add info’ when you’re looking at a supplier you think you can match to a company or charity)., we’ve matched about 40% of these to real-world organisations such as companies and charities.

While that might not seem very high, a good proportion of the rest will be sole-traders, individuals, or organisations we’ve not yet got a complete list of (Parish and Town councils, for example). And what it does mean is we can start to get a first draft of who supplies local government. And this is what we’ve got:

66,165 companies, with total payments of £3,884,271,203 (£3.88 billion), 38.1% of the total £10bn, in 579,518 transactions, making an average payment of £6,702.

8,236 charities, with total payments of £415,878,177, 4.1% of the total, in 55,370 transactions, making an average payment of £7,511.

Next time, we’ll look at the company suppliers in a little more detail, and later on the charities too, but for the moment, as you can see we’re listing the top 20 matched indivudual companies and charities that supply local government. Bear in mind a company like Capita does business with councils through a variety of different companies, and there’s no public dataset of the relationships between the companies, but that’s another story.

Finally, the whole dataset is available to download as open data under the same share-alike attribution licence as the rest of OpenlyLocal, including the matches to companies/charities that are receiving the money (the link is at the bottom of the Council Spending Data Dashboard). Be warned, however, it’s a very big file (there’s a row for every transaction), and so is too big for Excel (or even Google Fusion tables for that matter), so it’s most use to those using a database, or doing academic research.

* Note: there are inevitably loads of caveats to this data, including that councils are (despite the guidance) publishing the data in different ways, including, occasionally, aggregating payments, and using over-aggressive redaction. It’s also, obviously, only 40% of the councils in England., although that’s a pretty big sample size. Finally there may be errors both in the data as published, and in the importing of it. Please do let us know at info@openlylocal.com if  you see any errors, or figures that just look wrong.