Where our data comes from, and the licences it carries
Status: Draft for legal review. Not yet published. Version: 0.1 draft · Date: 7 September 2026 · Next review: within 12 months of publication Public location when published: https://axxointel.com/data-sources
We think you should be able to check our figures against the same records we used. This page names every source we take, the licence it comes under, what we do with it and what we leave behind.
Attribution
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Contains information from Companies House, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Sources
| Source | What we take | Published under | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local authority spending over £500 | Payment date, paying authority, payee name, purpose or narrative, amount, irrecoverable VAT, merchant category | Local Government Transparency Code 2015, paragraphs 28–29 | Open Government Licence v3.0 where the authority applies it; otherwise the authority's own stated licence, recorded per source |
| Contracts Finder | Opportunity, award and related notices for UK public contracts | Procurement legislation and Cabinet Office policy | Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Find a Tender Service | UK procurement notices, including award and payment notices | Procurement Act 2023 regime | Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Companies House register | Company number, registered name, address, status, incorporation and dissolution, officers and persons with significant control | Companies Act 2006 | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Individual authority publications | Contract registers and supplier information published by the authority itself | The authority's publication policy | Recorded per source; not assumed |
We keep a per-source provenance record holding the licence we verified, the date we verified it, the retrieval URL and the retrieval date. A source is not used until that record exists. We do not treat "it was on a public website" as a licence.
What the licence does not cover
The Open Government Licence does not cover personal data in the information it releases. This is not a technicality for us: local authority spending files name sole traders and individuals as payees, and around 37% of payee rows in our own measurement do not match a business register.
So where a published file contains personal data, that personal data is not licensed to us by the OGL. Our handling of it rests on a legitimate-interests basis, a documented assessment, a data protection impact assessment, and the safeguards described in our Transparency Notice — not on the licence. We say this because the alternative, treating an OGL file as uniformly free to use, is a mistake we would rather not make quietly.
The licence also excludes departmental logos and crests, third-party rights, and information not accessed via an official publication or a freedom of information disclosure. We take none of those.
What we leave behind
Personal data of payees. Payees resolving to a natural person rather than a registered entity are suppressed or pseudonymised before anything reaches a customer. Their value still contributes to the authority's totals, because leaving it out would make our figures wrong, but they are not named and not identifiable in any customer-facing view.
Contact data. We do not collect, hold or sell public-sector buyer contact details. No names, no job titles, no email addresses, no phone numbers. The technical contract between our internal platform and the customer product rejects contact records outright.
Supplier performance judgements. Where a notice type carries a buyer's assessment of a named supplier's performance, we do not ingest it by default. Republishing an authority's judgement about a named supplier to that supplier's competitors is a different act from republishing a payment line, and we treat it as one.
Accuracy, and what we do about it
Public spending data is imperfect at source. Councils publish in inconsistent formats, redact inconsistently, restate figures, and occasionally publish errors. We do not present our output as more certain than the evidence supports:
- Every figure is traceable to the source records that produced it.
- Coverage and freshness are shown alongside the numbers, so you can see what is missing or stale.
- Where a sample is too thin to support a percentage, we suppress the percentage rather than printing a misleading one.
- Every published dataset reconciles to the penny against the transactions behind it.
- Editions are compiled from reviewed, accepted evidence and require signed human approval.
Where we are wrong, tell us. If a payment or contract has been attributed to the wrong company, or a figure looks wrong, write to privacy@axxointel.com or use the form at axxointel.com/transparency/request. We will investigate, correct what we agree is wrong, and record the correction so it survives the next rebuild. If the error is in the authority's published file rather than in our processing, we will tell you which authority published it and what we have corrected on our side.
Reuse of our output
Our analysis, categorisations, resolved entity records and calculated measures are our own work and are licensed to customers under their subscription agreement. The underlying public records remain available from their original sources under their own licences, and nothing in our terms restricts your access to them there.
Linking
We link to the original notice or publication where one is available, so you can check any figure at source.