So What’s Wrong With Council Spending Data? Part III

Having spent the last few months collecting Local Government spending data for most of the councils in the North West of England I thought I’d collect together in a series of posts some of the technical issues I’ve encountered compiling the data sets. In Part I I I looked at issues related to CSV file formats and date reporting, in Part II I covered payment amounts and beneficiary names. In this part I will look at the scope of the data and touch on category information and why it doesn’t really help comparing individual councils.

The Section 2, paragraph 28 Transparency Code states that the following items must be published

The Local Government Association includes the above but adds the following specific exclusions

Having worked with several councils spending datasets from 2019 it occurred to me that equivalent councils have a different ‘feel’ to them. I think I first noticed this with ‘Teachers Pension’ payments, a few councils reported these most did not.

I have a suspicion that councils do not report the same items and think the easiest way to demonstrate that hypothesis is by looking at payments to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, what should be excluded is specified in the above LGA guidance.

To demonstrate some of the problems working with these datasets, HMRC appears in many forms which need to be resolved to a single name for comparison across councils

Once that’s is done you can view payments

Eight councils out of 26 record no payments to HMRC, of the councils that do record payments they vary from £748 to nearly £49 million, is this variance in amounts credible, to me it seems unlikely, looking at the number of payments over 2019, there is a rough correlation between amount paid and number of payments. Let’s take a closer look at some council payments to see if there is some category information that might shed some light on what the payments are and if they are actually items that should be excluded.

Let’s take a closer look at Trafford, which has 151 payments totalling £38,152,822.24

From the above query we can see that National Insurance and PAYE payments are included totalling nearly £37 million. Stockport doesn’t provide any meaningful categorisation of the HMRC payments. Blackburn with Darwin include NI payments including deductions and employer contributions. Other items appear in these and many councils payments to HMRC

It is unknown if the above items should be reported under the transparency code or the LGA guidance. When you also consider the Expenditure Range issue highlighted in Part II of these posts I think it would not be unfair to say the lack of consistency across councils makes the spending data less than useful for cross council comparisons.

Councils are required to provide a ‘merchant category(eg. computers, software etc)’ presumably to provide a high level of classifying the purpose of payments, sounds great doesn’t it? The LGTC does not expand on this. The LGA guidance mentions ‘Procurement classification / merchant category’ and suggests using either

I’ve seen references in the raw data files to two other classification methods

When researching around the subject I’ve seen the following systems mentioned

That’s the final post looking at some of the quality issues associated with this data, overall I think the spending dataset is important for transparency purposes. I don’t think it would be difficult to improve the overall quality and comparability but I doubt there is much will to make the required changes.