!!! Updated for 2024 !!!
The TownHallRichList is the most comprehensive list of council employees in the UK in receipt of over £100,000 in total remuneration in a single financial year. This has been created for the past 16 years by the TaxPayers' Alliance, a pressure group whose aim is to bring about a low-tax society. With a poor reputation when it comes to funding transparency, the group is often disparaged as being affliated with the Conservative party.
Nonetheless, the data appears to be wholly accurate, formed of FOI requests and published data. In the Results section, I present a geospatial visualisation of the data across the past 10 years; this highlights the sheer and growing number of council employees who earn over £100,000. This number being over 3 times larger than an average full-time employee in the UK.
Visualisation of data from the Past 11 Years:
Map of the 2024 data:
First, I downloaded the raw data and stored in the data folder. Next I process it into an acceptable format and store it as .pkl in the pickles folder; the code for this can be found in data_clean.ipynb.
With the processed data we can create maps from it, and sandwich multiple of these maps together to create GIFs. The code for doing this can be seen in map_create.ipynb
We use Python 3.10.9, it should work with different more recent versions as well.
Create the virtual environment and source it. Then install the packages required.
python3 -m venv "thrl_env"
source thrl_env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txtThe repository doesn't come with them, due to them being ~70MB, these can be sourced from here
And put them into a folder called shapefiles
pip freeze > requirements.txt