York Council Spending Above £500

So. Jon happened to tweet a link to York Councils spending on items over £500. I couldn't believe it when they were a collection of PDFs. What the actual...

Having found the CSVs here, I tried to import them into one single Google spreadsheet, but the import seemed to fail ( or run very, very slowly ) pulling in extra data.

So, I created a Google Fusion Table and that quickly whipped in the 6 files for this year. Then I could aggregate the sum of moneys spent and group them by supplier name. You can see the company data here... it looks like the picture below.

Interesting reading? Well, each item might need more explaining. The top two spends this year so far are the people organising new offices for the Council ( York Investors LLP £6,704,386) and Yorwaste Ltd £2,383,920 ( are these the people that empty our bins? ).

Next on the list is REDACTED - PERSONAL DATA £1,682,939 which I can only assume is spent REDACTED REDACTED etc HSBC REDACTED.

At number 11 is Streamline Taxis with a spend of £957,571.... this year! .... so far! Just imagine the size of that tip.

You can also view the data by expense category here. Did you know that "Other Agencies" get about £2 million of the Council's money? It just sounds sinister doesn't it? Other Agencies.

I did want to visualize this data into a Treemap, but my Fusion Table knowledge is lacking, so if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be grateful.

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