About Scrooge
Every London council has to publish each payment it makes over £500. Some publish everything over £250. The rule has been in place for more than a decade, and the data is public. In practice almost nobody reads it, because it sits in thousands of spreadsheets spread over 33 council websites, and no two councils lay their spreadsheet out the same way.
Scrooge gathers those spreadsheets into one place and lets you ask about them in plain English. We built it at the Tech Europe agentic AI hack on 19 September 2026.
How it works
There are three steps, and only the last one involves AI.
Collecting. A program visits each council's transparency page and downloads every spending file it finds, exactly as the council published it. We keep the originals so any figure can be traced back to the file it came from.
Tidying. One council calls a column "Supplier", another "Vendor Name", a third "Payee". Dates and amounts come in a dozen formats. A second program reads each layout and writes every payment into one shared table with the same columns: who paid, who got paid, how much, when, and what the council said it was for.
Answering. When you type a question, an AI model works out which lookups it needs, such as "total for Camden in 2024" or "largest payments to this supplier". It can only choose from seven fixed lookups. It cannot change the data, and it does not write its own database queries. The results come back as the tables and charts you see in the chat, and the model writes the sentences around them.
That split matters when you check an answer. The numbers in the cards come straight from the council's files. The sentences come from the AI. If the two disagree, believe the card.
What you can ask today
Scrooge holds 15 of London's 33 boroughs, about 15 million payments that add up to roughly £83 billion:
- Barnet, Bexley, Brent, Camden, Haringey
- Havering, Hounslow, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham
- Newham, Redbridge, Richmond, Wandsworth, Westminster
How far back it goes depends on the council. Barnet, Hounslow and Lambeth have more than ten years of payments. Haringey and Lewisham start in 2023. The newest payments are from summer 2026.
Questions that work well:
- How much did a borough spend in a given year, and on what?
- Who are a borough's biggest suppliers?
- How much has one company been paid, by one council or by all of them?
- What were the largest single payments?
- How do two boroughs compare?
If you are not sure what is covered, ask "what data do you have?" and Scrooge will list each borough with its date range.
Limitations
More than half of London is missing. Eighteen boroughs are not in yet. Five of them put their files behind bot protection, and we have chosen not to work around that. The other thirteen are researched and waiting for someone to write their reader.
It is not the whole of a council's spending. Payments under the £500 or £250 threshold are not published. Neither are salaries, and councils redact payments to individuals, such as foster carers or people receiving care budgets. A borough's total here will be lower than the figure in its annual accounts.
Supplier names are as the council typed them. The same company can appear as "Veolia", "Veolia ES (UK) Ltd" and "VEOLIA ENVIRONMENTAL". Scrooge matches on the text, so it can miss a spelling, and it can match too much. Ask about Capita and it also picks up every payment described as "capital".
Categories do not line up between councils. Each council has its own departments and its own labels for what a payment was for. Comparing total spend between boroughs is sound. Comparing "housing" in one with "housing" in another is rough.
Lists stop at 50 rows. Totals and rankings are worked out over every payment, but a list of individual payments shows 50 at most.
The source files have mistakes in them. A handful of Redbridge payments are dated in the 2030s. Some councils publish refunds as negative amounts, which we keep as they are. We fix how we read a file, never what the council wrote.
The AI can misread a question. It may pick the wrong year or the wrong borough, or give up on a question that needs too many lookups. Check that the card shows what you meant to ask. Scrooge also forgets everything when you start a new chat.
What is next: budgets
Knowing what a council spent is half the story. The other half is what it said it would spend.
We already download the budget side: the returns every council files with central government each year, which cover all 33 boroughs, the London council tax figures, and the full budget books of ten boroughs. None of it is in the database yet, so Scrooge cannot answer budget questions today.
The plan is to load those figures next to the payments, so you can ask whether a borough spent more on temporary accommodation than it budgeted, or how its planned spending on adult social care has moved over five years. Budget books are long PDFs rather than spreadsheets, so that work is harder than the payments were.
After budgets come the thirteen boroughs still waiting for a reader.
Source and contact
Scrooge is open source under the MIT licence. The code, the research on where each borough publishes, and the list of known problems are on GitHub. If a figure looks wrong, an issue there is the fastest way to tell us.
Support
Scrooge is free to use, and the servers and AI model behind it are not free to run. If it saved you an afternoon of spreadsheets, you can buy us a coffee.