About
About this site
Leeds Data turns the open data that Leeds City Council publishes into charts anyone can read, without opening a spreadsheet.
Why it exists
The council publishes hundreds of datasets at Datamillnorth.org, on potholes, spending, road safety, traffic, footfall and more. Most of it is raw CSV. I built this site so anyone can see how Leeds is doing without opening a spreadsheet.
Every chart answers a plain question: are our roads getting safer? how fast are potholes fixed? do you still need a car?
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). I don't add my 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 I handle the numbers
Council data is often messy: files change format over the years, labels are spelled inconsistently, and some records are incomplete. I clean and standardise where it's clearly safe to, and say so where it isn't. Two rules apply throughout:
- Show what the council published. Where records are missing or unclear, the page says so rather than filling gaps with guesses.
- Compare like with like. When the number of sensors or cameras behind a dataset changes over time, raw totals mislead, so the charts average per sensor instead.
How each dataset is treated
One line on the main quirk behind each page. The full notes sit under each page's charts.
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Council spending
Most rows leave the department blank, so it is inferred from the service area. Supplier names are not deduplicated.
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Potholes & road repairs
One row per recorded pothole. "Time to fix" excludes potholes still awaiting repair.
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Road safety & collisions
One row per injured casualty, so a single crash can produce several. Unreported injuries never appear.
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Getting around (cycling & traffic)
Average count per recorder per day, not raw totals, because the set of working recorders changes month to month.
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City centre footfall
Overlapping files are merged and de-duplicated per hour, then averaged per camera for the same reason.
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Council tax
Cash amounts, headline charge before discounts. The adult social care precept is folded into the council's share.
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Council housing
Bids measure competition, not the waiting list. By-ward figures use the post-2018 wards only.
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School places
Places offered and filled are only published for council-run schools, so those charts are mostly primaries.
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Air quality
DEFRA's Leeds Centre background monitor. Years under 75% coverage are withheld and the latest readings are provisional.
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Recycling & waste
DEFRA statistics for the whole council area. Fly-tipping counts partly reflect how incidents are reported.
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Planning applications
MHCLG quarterly returns for every chart. The map comes from PlanIt and is a guide, not statistics.
How the site is built
Leeds Data is a set of plain web pages on a content network, plus a nightly job that downloads any new data, aggregates it, and stores summaries for the pages to load. No tracking, no adverts. It is open source, 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. I'm Dan Stone. Leeds Data is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Leeds City Council.