Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — effectively its raw chequebook. This variable measures what share of that spending goes to temporary-staffing agencies (Reed, Hays, Adecco and the like). Agency workers typically cost far more than permanent staff doing the same job, so a high or rising share is a common warning sign that a council is papering over recruitment problems in an expensive way.
| name | agency_staff_spend_share |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | constructed |
| type | numeric |
| unit | proportion 0–1 |
| grain | council-month |
| role | feature |
| source | spend_to_matched_agency_suppliers / total_spend; agencies identified by name matching against a maintained list (Matrix SCM, Reed, Hays, Adecco, Randstad, Comensura) plus patterns ('recruitment', 'staffing', 'locum'), corroborated by Gloucestershire Expense Type / Account Group |
| period | per council-month (or pooled months) |
| missingness | Requires schema normalisation and a maintained agency list; three-council sample only. Undercounts where agency spend routes through a neutral-vendor intermediary, and Sefton's exclusion of staff payments makes its figure non-comparable. |
| score_note | Sharp temporary-staffing cost signal, but name-matching and Sefton's exclusions cut availability. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The share of a council-month's spend going to employment/agency-staff suppliers, identified mainly by supplier-name matching. It proxies reliance on temporary staff, a common driver of avoidable cost. The measure undercounts spend routed through neutral-vendor intermediaries, and Sefton's published data excludes staff payments outright, so its value cannot be compared with the other councils.