About This Project
Making council spending data accessible, understandable, and useful for residents of the Vale of Glamorgan.
Independent Project
This website is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected to Vale of Glamorgan Council. It is an independent civic technology project created to make publicly available spending data more accessible to residents.
Our Mission
The Vale of Glamorgan Council publishes information about almost all financial transactions above £500. This data is valuable for understanding how public money is spent, but it's often published in formats that are difficult to navigate, understand, or analyse.
Our goal is to take this public data and present it in a way that's:
- Accessible — Works on any device, follows web accessibility standards
- Understandable — Clear visualisations and plain language
- Explorable — Search, filter, and drill down into the data
- Transparent — Open source with documented methodology
Data Sources
Vale of Glamorgan Council Transparency Data
The primary source of spending data. The council publishes monthly spending reports as part of the Local Government Transparency Code requirements.
View official council finance page (opens in new tab)Companies House
Used to enrich supplier data with company information, including registered names, company status, industry classifications (SIC codes), and registration details.
Visit Companies House (opens in new tab)Methodology
Data Collection
We download the publicly available spending data files from the council's transparency publications. These files typically cover spending from April 2018 onwards.
Data Processing
The raw data goes through several processing steps:
- Normalisation — Supplier names are standardised to group different variations (e.g., "ABC Ltd" and "ABC Limited")
- Aggregation — Transactions are grouped by supplier to calculate totals, averages, and trends
- Enrichment — Supplier data is enhanced with Companies House information where a match can be found
- Validation — Data is checked for obvious errors or anomalies
Supplier Matching
Matching council payment records to Companies House entries is not always straightforward. The supplier name in council records may differ from the registered company name. We use a combination of exact matching and fuzzy matching techniques, but some matches may be incorrect or missing.
Limitations & Caveats
- Hobby project — not professionally verified
This site is created and maintained by a hobby developer as a personal project. The data processing, matching algorithms, and presentation have not been professionally audited or verified. Please treat all information as indicative only and refer to official council sources for definitive data.
- Not all spending is included
The council's transparency data only includes payments of £500 or more to a specific cost centre (excluding VAT). Smaller transactions aren't published.
Additionally, some payments are intentionally excluded to protect privacy. This includes sensitive areas like fostering and adoption payments, where publishing details could identify individuals or families. This is a sensible approach to balancing transparency with personal privacy.
- Supplier matching may have errors
The process of matching council supplier names to Companies House records is imperfect. Some links may be incorrect or missing.
- Data may not be current
There may be a delay between the council publishing new data and it appearing on this site. Check the "last updated" date for currency.
- Original source data quality
This site presents the council's published data. Any errors or inconsistencies in the original data will be reflected here.
Open Source
This project is open source. You can view the code, report issues, or contribute on GitHub. The data processing pipeline and website code are publicly available.
View on GitHub (opens in new tab)Questions or Feedback?
If you have questions about this project, notice any errors in the data, or have suggestions for improvements, please open an issue on GitHub or contact us through the repository.
For questions about the actual council spending or official data, please contact Vale of Glamorgan Council directly .