Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This is the council's own accounting label for what each payment was for (consultancy, utilities, equipment, and so on). It matters because it lets you ask not just how much a council spends, but what it spends it on — the starting point for spotting categories, like consultants or agency staff, where money leaks.
| name | expense_type |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | extracted |
| type | categorical |
| unit | council-defined expenditure classification |
| grain | transaction |
| role | stratifier |
| source | "Adur & Worthing: Expense_Type (often blank) / Procurement_Class_Type; Gloucestershire: Expense Type (+ Expense Code); Sefton: SUMMARY OF EXPENDITURE (+ ACCOUNT, COST CENTRE)" |
| period | monthly publications (sample: March–June 2026 files) |
| missingness | "Three-council sample only. Adur & Worthing's Expense_Type is often blank (fall back to Procurement_Class_Type); classifications are council-specific with no shared code list, so they align only via a manual crosswalk." |
| score_note | Council-specific taxonomy needing a manual crosswalk; often blank for Adur & Worthing. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The council's classification of what the payment was for (expense category, procurement class, or expenditure summary depending on council). It stratifies price-dispersion and agency-staff measures and corroborates supplier-name-based classification. The three taxonomies are incompatible without a crosswalk, and the primary Adur & Worthing field is frequently empty.