About
About this site
Leeds Data turns the open data that Leeds City Council publishes into charts anyone can read — no spreadsheets, no jargon, just the numbers behind how the city is doing.
Why it exists
The council publishes hundreds of datasets — on potholes, spending, road safety, traffic, footfall and more — at Datamillnorth.org. It's genuinely open, which is great, but most of it is raw CSV files that only make sense if you're comfortable with a spreadsheet. This site exists so that residents, journalists and councillors can see at a glance how Leeds is performing, without doing any of that work.
Every chart is built to answer a plain question — are our roads getting safer? how fast are potholes fixed? do you still need a car? — rather than just dumping numbers on a page.
Where the numbers come from
Almost everything here comes straight from Leeds City Council's own published data. Three topics cover things the council doesn't publish, so they use official national statistics instead: air quality (DEFRA's monitoring network), recycling & waste (DEFRA's local-authority returns) and planning (MHCLG's quarterly statistics, plus a map layer from the volunteer-run PlanIt). We don't add our own estimates or opinions to the figures. Each topic page links back to the exact dataset it uses, and shows when it was last updated, so you can always check the source yourself. The data is published under the Open Government Licence.
The site checks for new data every night, so the charts stay current as fresh figures are published — usually monthly, quarterly or annually, depending on the dataset.
How we handle the numbers
Council data is often messy: files change format over the years, labels are spelled inconsistently, and some records are incomplete. We clean and standardise where it's clearly safe to, and we're honest about the limits. Two principles guide everything:
- We show what the council published — we don't invent data. Where records are missing or unclear, we say so rather than filling gaps with guesses.
- We make fair comparisons. When the number of sensors or cameras behind a dataset changes over time, raw totals become misleading, so we average per sensor instead — which keeps a trend fair as equipment comes and goes.
How each dataset is treated
A short, plain-English note on the main quirk behind each page:
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Council spending
Taken directly from the council's transaction files. Most rows leave the department blank, so we infer it from the service area where there's a clear match; what we can't place is shown as "other". Supplier names aren't standardised, so the same company can appear under slightly different spellings.
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Potholes & road repairs
One row per recorded pothole. "Time to fix" is the gap between the report and completion dates; potholes still awaiting repair are left out of that figure. Locations are converted from Ordnance Survey grid references to map coordinates; a few records have no location and don't appear on the map, but still count in the totals.
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Road safety & collisions
One row per injured casualty, from police records, so a single crash can produce several. The council changed its file format around 2017 — older years spell severity out, newer ones use codes — which we standardise. Only reported injuries appear; minor knocks that go unreported don't.
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Getting around (cycling & traffic)
Counts from recorders on routes around Leeds. The set of working recorders changes month to month, so we use the average count per recorder per day rather than raw totals. Cycling is very seasonal, so years with only a few months of data are treated with caution.
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City centre footfall
Eight cameras count people passing, hour by hour. The published files overlap heavily and have changed format several times since 2008, and cameras have been renamed; we merge everything, de-duplicate each hour, and keep the council's later, revised (higher) figures where they conflict. As with the traffic counters, we average per camera.
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Council tax
One official table of charges per band going back to 1993. All figures are cash amounts, not adjusted for inflation, and show the headline charge before discounts. The adult social care precept is only listed separately in some years, so we fold it into the council's share throughout. Parish top-ups aren't included.
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Council housing
Bids are expressions of interest through the Leeds Homes lettings system — one household can bid on many homes, so they measure competition, not the length of the waiting list. Ward boundaries changed in 2018 and older files use the old wards, so by-ward figures cover recent years only, while citywide trends use every year published.
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School places
Application counts cover every state school in Leeds, but admission numbers and places filled are only published for community and voluntary-controlled schools — academies and free schools run their own admissions. Anything comparing applications to places therefore describes council-run schools only, and mostly primaries, since nearly all Leeds secondaries are academies.
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Air quality
The first page not built on council data: hourly readings from DEFRA's national monitoring network, at the Leeds Centre station — a "background" site, so kerbside air on busy roads will be worse. Annual averages are only shown for years where the monitor ran at least 75% of the time, following DEFRA convention, and the newest readings are marked provisional until DEFRA checks them. Levels are compared against both UK legal limits and the World Health Organization's stricter 2021 health guidelines, which carry no legal force.
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Recycling & waste
This page's figures come from DEFRA, not Datamillnorth — there is no live council dataset for this topic. Recycling, landfill and residual-waste rates are DEFRA's annual local-authority waste statistics, computed on a consistent national method from councils' WasteDataFlow returns (published as a spreadsheet we read directly); fly-tipping incidents and enforcement actions are DEFRA's per-authority returns. Everything covers the council area as a whole — nothing is published ward by ward. DEFRA's own caveat, repeated on the page: fly-tipping counts partly reflect how councils record and report incidents, not just how much is actually dumped.
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Planning applications
Built from two sources with different jobs. Every figure comes from MHCLG's quarterly planning returns (the PS1/PS2 open-data tables) — official statistics covering every English planning authority, with Leeds picked out by its authority code. The map and the large-applications list come from PlanIt, a free, volunteer-run service that compiles applications from council planning portals; it powers no statistics on the page, and if it's ever unavailable the map simply drops out while every chart keeps working.
How the site is built
Leeds Data is a small, deliberately simple site. It's a set of plain web pages hosted on a global content network, with a nightly job that downloads any new council data, crunches it, and stores ready-made summaries for the pages to load. There's no tracking and no adverts. The whole thing is open source — you can read every line, including the exact steps used to process each dataset, on GitHub.
Get in touch
Spotted a mistake, or want a particular dataset turned into a chart? The best place to raise it is the GitHub issues page. Leeds Data is an independent project built by Dan Stone. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Leeds City Council.