City Hall in London. Now you can see inside to where the money goes. Photograph: David Levene
The top five organisations on which the Greater London Authority spent the most money in the month from 1 April to 1 May 2010? Coming right up: they're Heath Lambert Ltd (£253,342), Norland Managed Services Ltd (£99,903), Bow Tie Television (£88,711), Amaze [Europe] Ltd (£73,939), and Rufus Leonard Ltd (£72,024).
I'll leave it to other inquiring minds to find out who those companies are and why they were paid those amounts - but the fact that we can see them at all is a result of the new openness of the GLA, the creation of its Datastore (which is also on Twitter as @londondatastore) and the order of the mayor that all expenditure over £1,000 should be itemised and made available to the public.
You'll find the full details - in CSV (comma separated variable) or PDF - at its Expenditure over £1,000 web page, which has data going back to April 2008.
The format of the CSV files (which are of course the only ones that are even close to being machine-readable) is simply enough: vendor, expense description, amount, document number (of the invoice).
If you've got a spare moment and a copy of MySQL to hand (I'm on a Mac, so I use MAMP - which lets you create an entirely portable version of MySQL+PHP+Apache, and the donationware Sequel Pro to populate the databases) then it's simple to put together a database of expenditure. And then it's just one SQL query:
select sum(amount) as vendor, vendor from gla group by vendor order by sum(amount) desc
and you have the list of expenditures, organised by who got paid and how much.
There are some interesting ones among them £23,500 to Think Espionage Ltd - which isn't a sign of Boris Johnson developing paranoia about being bugged; it's a "creative marketing agency" - and the amounts spent on energy (£51,940 to EDF Energy), only beaten by the £55,345 paid to OCS Group UK (Catering).
There is huge potential in the publication of these numbers to see quite where your money is going if you're a London ratepayer - and it has to be said that even though this has been generally overshadowed by the launch of data.gov.uk, local spending transparency is the next big target for the government; David Cameron said in February that local government should publish details of spending - though the commitment was only for spending above £25,000. From the data published by the GLA, it's clear that the floor for publication should be where they've set it - £1,000.
With the push coming from inside government (via Tim Berners-Lee, who is espousing the data.gov.uk philosophy to local government) and the top (with the new administration), it's going to be an increasingly interesting time to be a data wrangler. Are you ready?
Download the original data: CSV PDF Full data back to 2008
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Data summary
Table: total amounts spent in the month of April 2010 by the GLA, sorted by vendor.
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