Press and researchers

Who I am

Tom Pickup. Lancashire County Councillor for Padiham & Burnley West, elected 2025. Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care. Reform UK.

How the figures are sourced

Every figure I publish traces to a primary document. That means council spending files, committee papers, statements of accounts, Companies House filings, or Electoral Commission records. Each figure is checked at the source before it goes out. The source is named on the asset. If a number is modelled rather than official, it says so.

"Over £500" transparency data is not a council's total budget, and I say so wherever it appears. Spend and purchase orders are never summed together.

Corrections

If you find an error, tell me and it gets corrected quickly and plainly. A correction is permanent; a wrong number defended is worse.

What you can use

• Council spending data: AI DOGE publishes the spending files of councils and other public bodies in England. Search by supplier, category or council. Every figure comes from each council's own published transparency files.
• Analysis on this site: articles carry their sources inline. Quote with attribution.
• Comment: for Lancashire County Council official business, contact the council’s press office. For comment in a personal or party capacity, use the contact page or X (@tompickup).

Automated collection

Some figures on this site and its sister sites come from an automated reader of published public records. It identifies itself as UKStateData with a link to this page. It reads robots.txt before anything else and obeys it, fetches each file once and afterwards asks only whether the file has changed, sends one request at a time to any host, and never sends a request to a body as a request for information. If it has reached your server and you would rather it did not, say so through the contact page and it will stop for your site.

Response times

Same day for anything on deadline where I can. Say you are press in the subject line.