Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This variable adds up all those payments into a single monthly total per council. It is the yardstick everything else is measured against: shares, concentrations and ratios all divide by this number, and sudden jumps or dips in it are the first sign that something in a council's finances has changed.
| name | monthly_spend_total |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | constructed |
| type | numeric |
| unit | GBP |
| grain | council-month |
| role | denominator |
| source | sum(amount_gbp) per council-month, after per-council cleaning (sign convention, currency stripping) |
| period | per council-month |
| missingness | Requires schema normalisation first; three-council sample only. Comparable across councils only after documenting each council's exclusions (Sefton omits staff payments, housing benefits, financing, redacted social-care items) and sign/VAT conventions. |
| score_note | Straightforward denominator; comparability hinges on documented coverage exclusions. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Total published spend per council-month, the denominator for all share-based measures. It says how much over-£500 expenditure a council disclosed that month — not how much it spent, since coverage rules differ. Cross-council comparison is only valid alongside a record of each council's exclusions and the unstated VAT treatment.