Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This is the pounds-and-pence value of each of those payments, cleaned up so different councils' formats (stray £ symbols, negative-number conventions, thousands commas) can be read the same way. It matters because it is the basic ingredient of every other spending measure: without a trustworthy amount, nothing else can be compared.
| name | amount_gbp |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | GBP |
| grain | transaction |
| role | feature |
| source | Adur & Worthing: Amount (strip mis-encoded £ byte and thousands commas); Gloucestershire: Payment Amount (mostly negative — sign-flip, but flag mixed signs); Sefton: AMOUNT |
| period | monthly publications (sample: March–June 2026 files) |
| missingness | Three-council sample only. Adur & Worthing values carry a mis-encoded £ character and commas; Gloucestershire uses a credit-side (negative) convention with occasional positive suspense rows; VAT treatment is unstated by all three councils, so amounts are not guaranteed comparable. |
| score_note | Core input to everything, but per-council cleaning and unstated VAT limit direct signal value. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The transaction value in pounds sterling after per-council cleaning (currency-symbol stripping, sign convention, thousands separators). It is the core input to every spend measure. Amounts are only meaningful across councils after the documented normalisation steps, and VAT treatment being unstated means cross-council totals carry an unknown inclusive/exclusive inconsistency.