MPs' expenses: every claim from July to December 2009

Yesterday the House of Commons published the latest set of MPs' expenses. As I wrote then, they were published in a new searchable database , which actually makes the data harder to compile and extract. (Compare this to Simon Willison 's work on MPs' expenses crowdsourcing ). Well, thanks to the work of Guardian developers Daniel Vydra and Roberto Tyley , we've managed to scrape the entire lot out of the Commons website for you as a downloadable spreadsheet. You cannot get this anywhere else . Previously, we could give you totals claimed by MP: here's last year's . Because this is not a year's complete data, the Commons authorities are not keen on giving out totals - here's what they told me yesterday: Please note that overall totals for each individual MP's overall expenditure are not published at this time of year. This is because MPs do not all submit claims on the same timescale: for example some submit claims at the end of the month and others do so less frequently, or even at the end of the year. Thus comparisons between individual total expenditure would be misleading. It's a pretty reasonable reason, but that doesn't stop us working out totals from the data - with the enormous caveats above. Here's how the totals look for just those two quarters, thanks to the genius of Many Eyes (I know we've been using Many Eyes a lot recently, but if you want to produce a quick visualisation, then it really can't be beaten at the moment). The spreadsheet is just the raw numbers - with details of each claim for each MP. To get the exact details, you need to see the claim form on the commons site. This is just a start - what can you do with the data? Download the data • DATA: download the full datasheet World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter