Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This is the department or service the money was spent by — social care, highways, housing, and so on, as the council itself labels them. It matters because it shows where the money goes inside the organisation, letting like-for-like comparisons focus on the services residents actually experience.
| name | service_area |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | extracted |
| type | categorical |
| unit | council-defined service/department label |
| grain | transaction |
| role | stratifier |
| source | "Adur & Worthing: Department (+ DepartmentSubsection; blank on some rows); Gloucestershire: Service Area (+ 'Service Devison' — typo in source); Sefton: DEPARTMENT" |
| period | monthly publications (sample: March–June 2026 files) |
| missingness | "Three-council sample only. Adur & Worthing leaves Department blank on some rows (only Procurement_Class_Type populated); labels are council-specific taxonomies with no common coding, so cross-council stratification requires a manual crosswalk." |
| score_note | Necessary stratifier but three incompatible, uncontrolled taxonomies. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The council's own service/department label for the transaction. It lets spend measures be stratified by function — essential because raw concentration comparisons across unlike service mixes are misleading. Each council uses its own uncontrolled taxonomy (including the source typo "Service Devison"), so categories only align across councils after a hand-built mapping, and some Adur & Worthing rows have the field blank.