Manchester Redacted

Posted : Blog Post : 30.10.2020 - North West Open Data

man redacted1

1. Introduction

I’ve just finished the expenditure data for the 10 councils in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority for 2019, one of the first things that has become apparent is the amount of beneficiary names that are redacted.

2. Analysis

There are 120,475 rows of data with recipient names redacted of a total of 775,180 rows of data. That represents a massive 15.5%, the Cumbrian dataset has only 1.8% redacted – an order of magnitude larger.

man red by c

Rochdale, Stockport and Trafford account for the bulk of the redactions across the ten councils of Greater Manchester. Rochdale redact 13% of all their spending data by item. Bury by contrast redact less than 1%. In fact Bury redacts so little data that it’s values don’t show on the pie charts below.

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One council, Trafford account for nearly half the amount of total redactions

If we look at the chart below we see the average payment per redacted payment Tameside makes fewer but higher value redactions.

man av by c

We can look at the 15 largest redacted payments, we can see Trafford has a single redacted payment of over £24 million, and eight payments between £3-4 million.

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There’s more information on the redactions in the raw data tables, most are ‘Capital Grants’ but two are for the purchase of buildings including the £24 million line item. Most payments for properties that you see in the council datasets are payments to Solicitors who are acting on the councils behalf in the purchase, this accounts for the preponderance of legal firms in the top quartile.

select payment_date,amount,expense_area,expense_type
from trafford_spend_2019
where nwod_id in (46481,46482,77651,90918,109917,123587,179315,166629,166630,166631)
order by amount;
 payment_date |   amount   |  expense_area   |     expense_type
--------------+------------+-----------------+----------------------
 2019-03-07   | 1199500    | Capital Schemes | PURCHASE OF BUILDING
 2019-03-07   | 24200000   | Capital Schemes | PURCHASE OF BUILDING
 2019-11-28   | 3341696.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES
 2019-05-28   | 3363437.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANTS TO IND
 2019-06-20   | 3519317.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES
 2019-07-30   | 3533529.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES
 2019-12-19   | 3586475.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES
 2019-11-08   | 3679681.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES
 2019-11-13   | 3766867.00 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES
 2019-08-30   | 3852679.45 | Capital Schemes | CAP GRANT OTH BODIES

Here’s the full record for the £24 million building purchase

select * from trafford_spend_2019
where nwod_id =46481;
-[ RECORD 1 ]-------+------------------------------------------------------
nwod_id             | 46481
nwod_id_uri_code    |
body                | http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/local-authority/00BU
body_name           | Trafford Borough Council
payment_date        | 2019-03-07
transaction_number  | 1901300011
invoice_number      | 4038641
amount              | 24200000
supplier_name       | REDACTED
supplier_id         | REDACTED
vat_registration_nos|
expense_area        | Capital Schemes
expense_type        | PURCHASE OF BUILDING
expense_code        | 400100
bvacop              |
proclass            |
proclass_description|
extended_description|
profit_centre       | 990000

I’ve already outlined the Local Government Guidelines regarding redactions in a previous post. The disparity in redaction levels highlighted here shows how differently councils interpret the guidelines and to a certain extent says something about the individual councils themselves.