Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This flag says whether each payment is capital (building or buying long-lived assets like roads and housing) or revenue (day-to-day running costs like wages and services). The distinction matters because a council splashing out on a one-off building project is in a very different position from one whose everyday running costs are ballooning.
| name | capital_revenue |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | extracted |
| type | categorical |
| unit | flag (Capital | Revenue) |
| grain | transaction |
| role | stratifier |
| source | "Adur & Worthing: 'Capital\\Revenue'; Gloucestershire: 'Capital / Revenue'; Sefton: none" |
| period | monthly publications (sample: March–June 2026 files) |
| missingness | "Absent entirely for Sefton; three-council sample only. Column-name punctuation differs (backslash vs slash), so mapping is per council." |
| score_note | Clean binary split where published, but Sefton lacks it entirely. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Whether the payment is capital or revenue expenditure, as flagged by the council. It separates one-off investment spend from running costs, which behave very differently in concentration and totals. Sefton does not publish the flag, so any capital/revenue split excludes it, and cross-council comparisons must document that gap.