Local council spending over �500: full list of who has published what

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Local council spending over �500: full list of who has published what

With the deadline for publication over we see 293 of the 326 English councils have published their spending over �500

? Get the data

It was a defining moment of last year's open data revolution, when in June Sir Eric Pickles informed local authorities that they should publish items of spending over �500 by January 2011.

Now, with the January deadline passed, we see the Communities and Local Government website shows 293 of the 326 English councils have published their spending over �500.

The authorities will have worked their way through a succession of different advice and guidance. The latest guidance is from the local government transparency group. Previous to this the local data panel put together guidance on the data.gov.uk site. With different groups forming and producing their own advice, you can see why some councils are left uncertain about what and how to publish their spending.

However sticking to the common features in these guidelines helps to make the data easier to gather and analyse, and people are keen to do this. Take for example Chris Taggart from Openly Local. Taggart, who has so far imported 91 councils' spending, that is �6,543,052,419.51 of council spending in 892,784 transactions, finds the value of the data is in matching up suppliers with well defined companies in the Open Corporates database. So far he has matched 28,854 suppliers to companies. You can download the monster zipped CSV file of well organised council spending data from the footer of the Openly Local page. Although you won't be able to open this file in a spreadsheet, the data is valuable to programmers with an application in mind.

Unfortunately much of the local spending data does need time consuming attention to detail such as that Taggart has paid.

How could the quality of the data be imporved? Frequently when a central government body gathers data from local authorities they send out a spreadsheet template and ask the local finance team to complete it. This has been the case for the Whole of Government Accounts and the Revenue Outturn. It isn't clear why this approach to data gathering has not been used for gathering the local spending data.

However even with the various trickiness around gathering data from local authority websites, we are keeping track of the councils from up and down the country. You can see the latecomers submit their data with the interactive timeline on the Communities and Local Government website visualisation:

We have a list of all the councils that have complied so far along with a link to the latest data published by each council, so you could check your area for yourself. If you know of any data that is published by has not been included on the Communities and Local Government website then please let us know in the comment field below.