Methodology

How London Homelessness Accounts processes Ealing Council supplier payment files.

Period covered

April 2024 to March 2025 (FY2024/25).

Source

Ealing Council supplier payment files over £250, published as part of the council's transparency disclosures. The files are flat tables of invoice-level payments with fields including Supplier Name, Supplier ID, Service Label, Organisation Unit, Expenditure Category, Net Amount and a payment narrative.

Primary filter

The PLACE + housing-related dataset is built by selecting payment lines where:

• Service Label = PLACE
• Organisation Unit contains HOUSING

Housing Demand filter

The Housing Demand subset narrows further:

• Service Label = PLACE
• Organisation Unit = HOUSING DEMAND

TA-likely rule

The TA-likely subset includes Housing Demand payments coded as Rents, Bed and Breakfast Payments, or other categories or narratives indicating accommodation-related spend. The subset is described as TA-likely because Expenditure Category and narrative text together do not always identify temporary accommodation with certainty.

Supplier ID handling

Supplier names appear inconsistently in council payment files: with and without “Ltd”, under trading names, with personal names attached to a trading name, and occasionally as generic payment references. Where the same Supplier ID appears under multiple supplier-name strings, payment lines are aggregated to the Supplier ID. Supplier IDs are not assumed to map one-to-one to legal entities; some appear to operate as generic payment references and are noted as such where relevant.

Redacted supplier handling

Payment lines published as “Redacted Sensitive Supplier” are kept in the dataset and counted at totals level. Where a Supplier ID appears in both a named and a redacted form within the same financial year, that pattern is reported as an open scrutiny question rather than a finding of misclassification. The account does not attempt to re-identify redacted suppliers from third-party data.

Why PLACE + Housing is not the same as temporary accommodation

The PLACE + Housing perimeter includes payments related to housing functions beyond temporary accommodation: prevention activity, hostel commissioning, supported housing, housing operations and other Housing Demand activities. Temporary accommodation is a subset of these, not the whole. The TA-likely figure is the closest visible proxy from invoice-level data; it is not a contract-value figure and not a count of accommodation nights.

Why payment files show invoices, not contract value, profit or quality

Each payment line is a single invoice payment, after VAT, in a given period. A payment line does not, on its own, show:

• the contract value behind the payment;
• supplier profit margin;
• accommodation quality, suitability or compliance;
• the number of nights, units or households the payment funded;
• whether the accommodation sits inside or outside the borough;
• ultimate property ownership behind the supplier;
• whether the payment relates to prevention, relief, temporary accommodation or another housing function.

Limitations

• Supplier names are inconsistently written and often include trading names.
• Companies House matches are treated as source-linked notes, not as final group consolidation.
• Some Expenditure Category labels are coarse and do not map cleanly to TA categories.
• Late-posted invoices and adjustments may shift small amounts between financial years.
• Cross-borough comparisons require aligning different councils' chart-of-accounts conventions, which this account does not yet do.

Versioning

Each account is versioned. Material corrections produce a new version with a separate URL; the previous version remains accessible at its original path so that earlier citations resolve.