Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This is the name of the company or organisation each payment went to. It matters because 'who gets the money' is the most revealing column in the whole dataset — it is what lets you spot councils dependent on a single contractor, compare prices paid to the same firm, and catch duplicate payments.
| name | supplier |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | extracted |
| type | string |
| unit | supplier name (free text) |
| grain | transaction |
| role | join-key |
| source | "Adur & Worthing: Supplier (trim leading spaces); Gloucestershire: Supplier Name; Sefton: SUPPLIER" |
| period | monthly publications (sample: March–June 2026 files) |
| missingness | "Three-council sample only. Free-text names need case/whitespace/suffix normalisation (Ltd/Limited) before any cross-council matching; no shared supplier ID exists — only Gloucestershire has an often-blank company-number column. Some councils redact sensitive payees (e.g. Sefton social-care items)." |
| score_note | Unlocks all supplier-level constructs, but unnormalised free text with no shared ID. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The payee name as published by each council, mapped to a common column. It is the key for all supplier-level constructs (concentration, duplicate candidates, cross-council matching). Names are unnormalised free text — case, whitespace, and legal-suffix variants must be cleaned first, and matching across councils remains fuzzy because no council-independent supplier identifier exists in the sample.