Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This variable simply records which council made each payment, so that transactions from different councils' files can be pooled into one dataset and compared. It is the label that makes any 'council A vs council B' question possible in the first place.
| name | council |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | extracted |
| type | categorical |
| unit | council identifier |
| grain | transaction |
| role | join-key |
| source | "Adur & Worthing: Entity column (Adur / Worthing / Joint); Gloucestershire: constant per file; Sefton: constant per file" |
| period | monthly publications (sample: March–June 2026 files) |
| missingness | "Three-council sample only. Usually implied by the source file rather than a column — only Adur & Worthing carry it in-row (Entity), including a 'Joint' value that belongs to neither council alone." |
| score_note | Essential join key with no efficiency content of its own. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The publishing council for each transaction, taken from the Entity column where present and otherwise assigned constant per file. It is the primary join key to other council-level datasets and the grouping key for all constructed measures. Adur & Worthing's shared-services "Joint" entity must be handled explicitly, as its spend belongs to neither individual council.