Policies

Editorial policy

What this site is

AI DOGE publishes what public bodies in England say they spend, from the files those bodies publish themselves. Every figure on the site traces to a document a council or other public body put on its own website, and each page names the document it used.

The site is independent. It is not affiliated with any council, government department or public body, and no public body has any say over what appears here.

Who publishes it

The site is published by Tom Pickup, a private individual. Tom is an elected county councillor for Padiham and Burnley West on Lancashire County Council, sits in that council’s cabinet as Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care, and is a member of Reform UK.

A reader of a site that covers Lancashire County Council and measures every council in England the same way needs to know that. It is declared in the public register of interests, it is set out here in full, this page is linked from the legal line at the foot of every page on the site, and we manage it in the following ways.

The declaration lives here and only here. The footer carries the statutory imprint, which names the promoter and nothing else, because an imprint is a statement of who published the material rather than a place to argue about it. Nothing is hidden by that: the link to this page is on every page, and this page is where the full position is stated.

How the conflict is managed

1. The same automated rules run for every council. There is no manual override for any council, including Lancashire County Council, Burnley Borough Council, or any council run by any party. The rules are published on the methodology page and the code that applies them is published with the site.
2. No council resources are used. The site is built and run on privately owned equipment and accounts, in private time, with no council officer time, council data access, or non-public council information. The only Lancashire County Council material on the site is what the council publishes to the public.
3. The site is entered in the publisher’s register of interests at Lancashire County Council.
4. Until an external reviewer is appointed, no finding that names an organisation is promoted at all.
5. The site does not publish savings estimates, efficiency scores, political commentary or campaign material. Material of that kind produced by the publisher lives elsewhere and is not linked from here.

Neutrality and the public interest test

The site takes no position on any party, council or councillor. It treats every council in England identically, whoever runs it, and it publishes no commentary, no campaign material and no view on whether any payment was right or wrong.

Anything beyond a public body’s own published figures is published only if it passes a public interest test: the information must concern the use of public money, be derived from documents the public body itself published, be produced by a rule that is stated on the page and applied to every body alike, and be something a reader could check for themselves from the sources linked. If a figure fails any part of that test it is not published, however interesting it is.

Funding

The site is funded by the publisher personally. It carries no advertising, takes no payment from any supplier, council or political organisation, and sells no data. If that ever changes, this page will say so first.

What we publish, and what we do not

We publish:

• Payments over each body’s publication threshold, as the body published them, with the body’s own supplier name, date, amount and description.
• Totals, monthly patterns and largest recipients derived from those payments, with the rule that produced each one stated beside it.
• Budget and outturn figures from the returns councils make to central government, with the return named.
• Whether each body has published what the Local Government Transparency Code requires, as at a stated date, with the page we checked.

We do not publish:

• The names of individuals. Councils are required to withhold the names of private individuals, foster carers, care recipients and staff. We mirror every such redaction and add our own filter for names that look like a person’s. Payments to individuals are counted in totals and never listed.
• Any figure we could not reconcile. A council year that does not reconcile against the council’s own outturn or budget shows no total. The page says what is held and why no figure is shown.
• Any claim that a payment is wrong, wasteful or improper. Where an automated check flags a pattern, the site states the rule that fired and the question it raises, not a conclusion.
• Rankings of councils by what they spend. Coverage differs between councils and such a ranking would be false. Councils are compared only within a type and only when every council in the comparison has a complete, reconciled year.

The source always wins

If a figure on this site and the council’s own published file disagree, the council’s file is right and ours is wrong. Tell us, and we will correct it and record the correction.

Corrections, right of reply and complaints

The corrections log is public and permanent. Anyone named on the site, or any public body covered by it, can ask for a correction or reply under the right of reply policy. Complaints about how we handle personal data follow the complaints procedure. All three are linked from the legal line at the foot of every page, along with the privacy notice, the cookies page, the accessibility statement, the licensing terms and the imprint.

Contact

info@aidoge.co.uk

Corrections log

Every change made to a published figure, statement or page because it was wrong or misleading is recorded here, permanently, with the date, what changed, why, and who asked. Corrections are listed newest first. Nothing is removed from this log.

If you believe something on this site is wrong, write to info@aidoge.co.uk with the page address and the council’s own document that shows the correct figure. Replies go out within two working days. A correction or an explanation follows within ten.

Log

2026-09-06: interest declaration moved to the editorial policy page

• Where: the footer of every page, and the editorial policy page.
• What changed: the footer paragraph naming the publisher’s council role and party membership was removed. The declaration now sits on the editorial policy page alone, which the legal line at the foot of every page links to. The editorial policy sentence saying the interest is stated on every page was corrected to say that every page links to the page that states it. The statutory imprint naming the promoter stays in the footer of every page and on every share card, unchanged.
• Why: the footer sentence described a declaration that is now made in one place, so it no longer described the site.
• Raised by: the publisher.

2026-09-06: privacy, cookies and accessibility statements published

• Where: the policies page.
• What changed: a privacy notice, a cookies page and an accessibility statement were added as tabs, an imprint tab was added, and the licensing tab gained a copyright section. The privacy and cookies pages were written from the site’s code and name the two values it stores in a reader’s browser and the three hosts a page contacts.
• Why: the site published a data protection statement covering the spending records and no notice covering the reader’s own visit.
• Raised by: internal review.

2026-09-03: budget comparison figure removed

• Where: the Budgets page of every council site.
• What changed: a tile comparing total recorded payments across several years with a single year’s net revenue budget, and describing the result as a percentage over budget, was removed.
• Why: the two figures measure different things over different periods and the comparison was misleading.
• Raised by: internal review.

2026-09-03: savings figures removed from council pages

• Where: the home page of every council site.
• What changed: tiles showing a national savings estimate and a savings delivered figure were removed.
• Why: the figures were modelled estimates presented without their assumptions, on pages otherwise showing only published data.
• Raised by: internal review.

2026-09-03: statement about political affiliation corrected

• Where: the Legal page and the About page.
• What changed: a statement that the site has no political party affiliation was replaced by a declaration that the publisher is a Reform UK county councillor and a description of how that conflict is managed.
• Why: the original statement was untrue as written.
• Raised by: internal review.

Right of reply and takedown

Who this applies to

Any organisation named on the site as a recipient of public money, any public body the site covers, and any individual who believes they are identifiable from something the site publishes.

Right of reply

Before the site promotes any finding that names an organisation, meaning any placement beyond the organisation appearing in a payment row or a list of largest recipients, we write to the organisation with the finding, the rule that produced it, and the source documents. The organisation has five working days to reply. Any reply is published with the finding, unedited, up to 300 words. If the reply shows the finding to be wrong, the finding is not published and the correction is logged.

Findings that appear only as a council’s own published row do not go through this process, because the site is republishing what the council published. The row links to the council’s file so the reader can check.

Asking for a correction

Write to info@aidoge.co.uk with the page address and the document that shows the correct position. The council’s own published file is decisive. We acknowledge within two working days and correct, explain or decline with reasons within ten. Every correction is recorded in the public corrections log.

Asking for removal

We remove material where the law requires it, and we do not remove material because a body would prefer its published spending not to be visible.

We will remove or suppress, on request and without delay:

• The name of a private individual, foster carer, care recipient, benefit recipient or member of staff that a council published in error. Send the page address. We suppress the name within two working days, keep the payment in the totals, notify the council of its error, and record the event in the corrections log without the name.
• Anything that identifies a child or a vulnerable adult, immediately on notice.
• Anything a court has ordered removed.

We will consider, case by case:

• A sole trader who asks that their trading name be removed. Councils are required to publish payments to sole traders and the Local Government Transparency Code says sole traders should expect this. We will usually decline, and will always explain why, and the requester can complain under the complaints procedure.

We will not:

• Remove a payment row that matches the council’s published file.
• Alter a figure at the request of the body that published it, other than by replacing it with the body’s own corrected file, which is recorded as a correction.

Records

We keep a record of every request, the decision and the reason, and publish a count of requests and outcomes each year.

Complaints procedure

This is the complaints procedure for how the site handles personal data, as the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 requires of every data controller. It also covers any other complaint about the site.

How to complain

Write to info@aidoge.co.uk with “Complaint” in the subject line, the page address, and what you want to happen.

What happens next

1. We acknowledge your complaint within thirty days, and in practice within two working days.
2. We investigate. If your complaint concerns a figure, we check it against the public body’s published file. If it concerns personal data, we check what we hold, where it came from and the basis on which we published it.
3. We reply with a decision and reasons. Where we uphold the complaint we say what we have changed and record it in the corrections log. Where we do not, we say why.

If you are not satisfied

You can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. You do not have to complain to us first, but it is usually faster.

Records

We keep a record of every complaint and its outcome for two years and publish the number received and upheld each year.

Data protection statement

Who is the controller

The publisher named on the editorial policy page is the data controller for any personal data on this site. Contact: info@aidoge.co.uk.

What personal data the site contains

The site republishes payment records that councils and other public bodies publish under the Local Government Transparency Code 2015 and equivalent rules. Most recipients are companies and public bodies, which are not personal data. Some recipients are sole traders or partnerships trading under a personal name, which is personal data.

Councils are required to withhold the names of private individuals, foster carers, care recipients, benefit recipients and staff. We mirror every such redaction, and we run our own filter for names that look like a person’s before publication. Names that fail the filter are held back until checked. Payments to individuals are counted in totals and never listed.

The site itself sets no accounts and collects no personal data from visitors. The privacy notice describes what a visit to a page involves, and the cookies tab lists the two values the site stores in a reader’s browser.

The basis on which we publish

We publish sole-trader names on two bases.

First, legitimate interests. There is a public interest in knowing who receives public money, Parliament has required councils to publish it, the Transparency Code says sole traders should expect their payments to be visible, and the information was already public before we republished it. We have recorded a legitimate interests assessment and will provide it on request.

Second, the journalism exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018. The site is published with a view to publication of material in the public interest, and we have regard to the Information Commissioner’s code of practice on journalism.

What we do not do

We do not build profiles of individuals. Entities our matching identifies as individuals get no supplier page and are excluded from cross-council totals. We do not sell, licence or share personal data with anyone.

Where the data comes from and how long we keep it

Each payment row links to the public body’s file it came from. We keep a copy of every source file, with its checksum and the date we fetched it, so that a figure can be checked and so that a body’s later change to a file is recorded rather than silently applied. Source files are kept indefinitely as a record of what was published. If a body withdraws a file, we mark the rows as superseded and say so on the page.

Your rights

You can ask what personal data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, and object to our publishing it. Write to info@aidoge.co.uk. The right of reply and takedown page says how requests about a published name are handled. The complaints procedure says how to complain, and how to complain to the Information Commissioner.

Privacy notice

This notice describes what happens to a visitor’s own data when they read this site. What happens to personal data inside the published spending records, which is a different question, is on the data protection tab.

Everything below is written from the site’s code rather than from a template. If the code and this page ever disagree, the page is wrong and we will correct it.

Who is the controller

The publisher named on the imprint tab is the data controller. Write to info@aidoge.co.uk about anything on this page.

What the site collects from you

Nothing directly. The site has no accounts, no login, no sign up, no newsletter, no comment box, no contact form and no search box that reaches a server. There is nowhere on the site to type your name, your email address or anything else about yourself, and nothing you do on a page is sent anywhere to be recorded.

The site loads no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising, no social media embed, no third party font and no tracking pixel. Its Content Security Policy allows the browser to connect to three places and no others, and the three are listed below.

The three requests a page makes

The site’s own host. Pages, stylesheets, scripts, fonts and images come from aidoge.co.uk. The site is served by Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare receives your IP address and the standard request headers your browser sends, because a web server cannot return a page without them, and it uses them to deliver the page and to protect the site from attack. Cloudflare acts as a processor for us under its data processing addendum, keeps request logs under its own published retention periods, and processes the data outside the UK under the transfer terms in that addendum. The publisher sees only aggregate request counts in the hosting dashboard and no record of an individual visitor.

The data host. Council payment files, supplier files and the transaction explorer’s database are fetched from data.aidoge.co.uk, which is Cloudflare object storage under the same terms. The explorer asks it for byte ranges of a council’s database as you filter and scroll. Those requests carry your IP address to Cloudflare in the same way and carry nothing about you.

postcodes.io. The postcode box on the home page sends the postcode you type to api.postcodes.io, which returns the council area codes for it. That happens only when you press the button. The postcode is sent to postcodes.io and nowhere else, it is not stored by this site, it is not written to your browser, and it is not logged by us. postcodes.io is run by Ideal Postcodes and has its own privacy terms. If you would rather not use it, the same councils are reachable from the list of every public body.

What is stored in your browser

Two values, both set only when you ask for them, both readable only by this site, and neither one sent anywhere.

aidoge-theme holds a light or dark choice when you use the theme switch. No value means the site follows your system setting. aidoge-explorer-expert holds whether the transaction explorer’s expert columns are switched on.

The site sets no cookies at all. The cookies tab has the detail and explains why there is no consent banner.

The lawful basis

For serving the site, our legitimate interest in publishing it and your interest in reading it. Your IP address reaches our host because the request cannot be delivered without it, and it is used for delivery and security and for nothing else.

For the postcode lookup, your explicit request. Nothing is sent until you press the button.

For the browser storage, your explicit request in both cases, and no personal data is involved in either.

For the spending records themselves, including sole trader names, legitimate interests and the journalism exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018. The data protection tab sets out the reasoning, and the public interest test the site applies is on the editorial policy tab.

How long anything is kept

We keep nothing about you, so there is nothing for us to delete. Our host’s request logs are kept for its own retention periods, which we do not set and cannot extend. The values in your browser stay until you clear your browser data or change the setting back.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you can ask for access to personal data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, object to our processing it, ask us to restrict it, and ask for it in a portable form. Write to info@aidoge.co.uk. We reply within one month.

In practice a request about a visit to the site will find that we hold nothing. A request about a name in the published spending records is handled under the right of reply and takedown tab.

Complaining

The complaints procedure tab says how to complain to us. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113, without complaining to us first.

Changes

Any change to this notice is a change to this page and is recorded in the corrections log.

Cookies and browser storage

This site sets no cookies

Not one, of any kind, first party or third party. Nothing in the site’s code writes to document.cookie, and no analytics, advertising, tag manager or social media script that might write one is loaded on any page.

That is why you see no cookie banner. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations require consent before storing information on a reader’s device unless the storage is strictly necessary for a service the reader has asked for. This site stores two values, both described below, and both are set only because a reader asked for them by using the control that sets them. Nothing is stored for analytics, measurement, personalisation or advertising, so there is nothing to ask consent for and a banner would be asking you to agree to nothing.

What is stored in your browser

Two values in local storage, which belongs to this site alone, is readable only by pages on aidoge.co.uk, is never attached to a request, and never leaves your device.

aidoge-theme records a light or dark choice made with the theme switch in the site header. If you have not used the switch, no value exists and the site follows your operating system setting. Setting the switch back to “system” removes the value.

aidoge-explorer-expert records whether the extra columns in a council’s transaction explorer are switched on. It exists only after you use that toggle.

Both are settings you asked the site to remember. Neither identifies you, and clearing your browser’s site data for aidoge.co.uk removes both, at the cost of the site forgetting the two settings.

What else the browser keeps on its own

Your browser caches pages, stylesheets, fonts, images and the parts of a council’s spending database that the transaction explorer downloads, in the ordinary way it caches any website, under the cache headers our host sends. That is the browser’s own storage and its own controls, and this site neither reads it nor can distinguish a cached visit from a fresh one.

Third parties

The postcode box on the home page sends a postcode you type to api.postcodes.io. That is a request rather than storage, it happens only when you press the button, and it sets nothing on your device from this site. The privacy tab describes it in full, along with the two hosts the site fetches its pages and data from.

No other third party is contacted by any page on this site.

Turning it off

Blocking site data for aidoge.co.uk in your browser breaks nothing. The theme follows your system setting, the explorer opens without expert columns, and every page and figure works exactly as it does otherwise. The code that reads these values already handles a browser that refuses them.

Accessibility statement

This statement applies to aidoge.co.uk and to every page on it.

The regulations do not apply to this site

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 bind public sector bodies. This site is published by a private individual, is not a public sector body and is not funded by one, so the regulations do not apply to it and there is no route to the Equality and Human Rights Commission over anything on this page.

The statement is published anyway, in the format the regulations set, because a site about public bodies should be readable by the people those bodies serve and because a statement written to that format is the one readers know how to use.

Using this website

The site is run by Tom Pickup. It is built so that you can:

• Change colours, contrast levels and fonts through your browser or operating system.
• Zoom in to 400 per cent without text spilling off the screen.
• Read and use every page on a phone at 375 pixels wide without scrolling sideways.
• Navigate the whole site with a keyboard alone, including the policy tabs, the postcode box, the sortable tables and the transaction explorer.
• Switch between light and dark themes, or leave the site to follow your system setting.
• Listen to the site with a screen reader.

AbilityNet has advice on making your own device easier to use.

How accessible this website is

The site meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 at level AA, with the exceptions listed below. That rests on our own testing rather than on an audit by anyone else, which is itself a limitation and is listed as one.

Compliance status

The site is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts do not fully conform, and the parts we know of are named next.

Content that is not accessible

No independent audit. Nobody outside this project has audited the site and it has not been tested with users of assistive technology. Automated testing finds many barriers and cannot find all of them, so there may be problems this statement does not list.

Automated testing covers page types rather than every page. Eight pages are tested on every change, one for each kind of page the site builds. The site publishes several thousand pages from the same templates, so a fault in a template is caught and a fault in one body’s data may not be.

The transaction explorer builds its table as you scroll. Only the rows near the viewport exist in the page at any moment, which is what keeps a table of hundreds of thousands of payments usable. Some screen readers announce the total row count and the position within it later than a reader would expect. The CSV export button beside the table writes the current filter to a file, up to the row cap it states, which is the reliable way to read a long result end to end.

Wide tables scroll sideways inside their own frame. On a narrow screen a payments table or a budget table is a scrolling region within the page rather than a reflowed list. The page itself does not scroll sideways, but reaching the right hand columns of those tables takes a horizontal scroll.

Council documents are not ours. Every figure links to the file the public body published. Those files are that body’s spreadsheets, CSVs and PDFs, many of which are not accessible, and we cannot fix them without altering the evidence. We publish the figures from them as accessible HTML on our own pages so that the source file is a check rather than the only way to read the data. Where a council’s own file is unusable, the council is the body to ask.

How we test

Automated checks with axe run against a built copy of the site on every change, covering WCAG 2.1 level A and level AA rules, on the home page, the bodies hub, a council page with full figures, a council page with none, a budgets page, a supplier page, the compliance table and the coverage table. A change that introduces a violation does not merge. Separately, every one of those pages is loaded at 375 pixels and 1280 pixels and checked for horizontal overflow, and the site’s markup, headings, landmarks, link text and colour contrast tokens are reviewed by hand when they change.

Feedback and reporting problems

If you find a barrier, or need something on this site in a different format, write to info@aidoge.co.uk with the page address and what happened. We reply within two working days and say what we will do and when. If we cannot fix something we say why.

We do not currently offer alternative formats on request as a routine service, because the site is one person’s project, but ask and we will do what we can with the figures behind any page.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, the complaints procedure tab says how to take it further.

Preparation of this statement

This statement was prepared on 6 September 2026 and describes the site as it is on that date. It was written from the site’s own test results rather than from a template. It will be reviewed when the site’s structure changes and at least once a year, and any change to it is recorded in the corrections log.

Licensing and reuse

The data the site uses

Payment data comes from files published by each council or public body. The Local Government Transparency Code recommends publication under the Open Government Licence. Where a body states that licence, the site records it and reuses the data under it with attribution to the body. Where a body states no licence, the site records that too and reuses the data on the basis that the Code requires its publication for reuse. Each body’s page shows which applies.

Budget and outturn data comes from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Company matching uses Companies House data under the same licence. Boundaries and geography come from the Office for National Statistics under the same licence.

The Open Government Licence does not cover personal data. Personal data on this site is handled as the data protection statement describes.

Reusing what this site publishes

Everything the site derives from those sources, including totals, supplier pages, downloads and the API, is released under the Open Government Licence v3.0. You may copy, publish, adapt and build on it, for any purpose, provided you attribute it as “AI DOGE, aidoge.co.uk, from data published by [body]” and do not suggest that the site or any public body endorses your use.

Downloads carry a checksum so that a copy can be verified against what the site published.

Any database right in the collection this site assembles is licensed on the same terms as the data in it, so nothing in this section takes back with one hand what the Open Government Licence gives with the other.

Copyright in the site itself

The words written for this site, meaning the policy pages, the explanatory text and the captions rather than the figures, and the design, the layout and the code behind them, are copyright Tom Pickup. Quote them with attribution as you would quote anything else. The figures, the tables and everything derived from the published files are under the Open Government Licence v3.0 as set out above, and that is the part anyone reusing this site actually needs.

The copyright line at the foot of every page states the same thing in one sentence.

Attribution the other way

Where this site relies on a public body’s own file, the page names the body, the file and the date the file was read, and links to it. That is the attribution the Open Government Licence asks for and it is on the page rather than in this policy, because a licence obligation discharged on a policy page nobody opens is not discharged.

Imprint

The imprint

The promoter of this site is Tom Pickup. The imprint line naming him sits in the legal line at the foot of this page, as it does at the foot of every page.

It is not restated in this paragraph on purpose. The line has one definition in the site’s code, read by the footer and by every share card, and a second copy typed into a policy page is the copy that goes stale on the day the first one changes. Read it below, where it is live.

No postal address appears in the line because none is configured. When one is set it joins the name in the same place, on every page and on every card, with no other edit anywhere.

Why it is here

Part 6 of the Elections Act 2022 requires digital material to carry the name and address of the promoter where the material is published by or on behalf of a candidate, a holder of relevant elective office, a registered party or a recognised third party campaigner, or where it is paid for. The requirement follows the material rather than the page it sits on, so a share card lifted off this site and posted somewhere else carries the line as well.

The publisher’s elected role and party membership, and the way the resulting conflict of interest is managed, are set out in full on the editorial policy tab. They are not repeated here or in the footer, because the imprint is a statement of who published the material and nothing more.

Where it appears

In the legal line at the foot of every page, including the not found page, and on every Open Graph share card the site generates. Both surfaces read the same constant, so neither can go stale while the other is updated. Automated tests fail the build if the line is missing from either.

Contact

info@aidoge.co.uk, for anything about the imprint or anything else on the site. The complaints procedure tab is the formal route.