MPs’ travel expenses

[Matt Riggott]

Those of you who've been following the recent palaver over MPs’
expenses might be interested in a little project I've had a tinker
with this weekend.

After a request from Charles Arthur of The Guardian to map
constituencies’ distances from Westminster to the amount each MP
claimed in travel expenses, I did just that. Full details at:

<http://mpexpenses.appspot.com/>

All comments appreciated.

See you at the next Refresh,
M.

--
Matt Riggott (mailto:matt.r...@gmail.com).
Dictated but not read.

[Cole Henley]

Excellent job Matt
One enhancement I can think of would be to use party affiliation as a
colour signifier for the chart.
Could make for some interesting patterns to see if there are general
party-wide (ab)use of expenses.
Came across this blog post the other day
(http://linlithgow-libdems.blogspot.com/2009/03/guido-headline-misleading.html)
which suggested correlating expenses with constituency sizes.
That might be an interesting experiment for those of a geo-spatial
disposition...
Hope you're enjoying the Wild West.

Cole


2009/4/5 Matt Riggott <matt.r...@gmail.com>:

[Jim Wolff]

Brilliant! Now's definitely a good time to release any exposure on
expenses..

Only thing is, it doesn't show how many times the MP actually
travelled. So while an MP may live 5 miles away and claimed £5000, s/
he may have travelled 100s of times compared with an MP in the north
of Scotland who doesn't make it down so often.

Or am I missing the point here?

[htothep]

Hello Matt,
We've not met but just wanted to say Great stuff! Like the idea of
adding in colour coding too, or any kind of Enviro / Carbon units
depending on the way they travel. Air, train etc.

Can I send this onto people? I know lots of folks who would love to
see it.

Plus, if you're through in West side Glasgow TechMeetUp is due to kick
off at end of April, if you'd like to come along would be great to see
you.

HP

> > Matt Riggott (mailto:matt.rigg...@gmail.com).
> > Dictated but not read.

[Matt Riggott]

On 6 Apr 2009, at 10:01, Cole Henley wrote:
> One enhancement I can think of would be to use party affiliation as a
> colour signifier for the chart.

That's something I wanted to include from the beginning, but I
couldn't find a way to use multiple plot colours on a Google scatter
plot [1]. If anyone knows if this is possible, let me know and I'll
update the chart.

M.

[1] <http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/scatterchart.html

[Matt Riggott]

On 6 Apr 2009, at 10:09, Jim Wolff wrote:
> Only thing is, it doesn't show how many times the MP actually
> travelled. So while an MP may live 5 miles away and claimed £5000, s/
> he may have travelled 100s of times compared with an MP in the north
> of Scotland who doesn't make it down so often.
>
> Or am I missing the point here?

Nope, you're right, the statistics are a very blunt instrument. As
far as I know there's no data about how many trips an MP made, so I
can't break it down that far.

I guess the closest thing available would be to get the percentage of
debates attended from the They Work For You API. I'll have a look at
that.

[Matt Riggott]

On 6 Apr 2009, at 11:41, htothep wrote:
> Can I send this onto people? I know lots of folks who would love to
> see it.

Yep, send it on, it's for public consumption.

> Plus, if you're through in West side Glasgow TechMeetUp is due to kick
> off at end of April, if you'd like to come along would be great to see
> you.

I'm planning on going to the Weegie Techmeetup, so I'll see you there.

M.

--

[htothep]

> Yep, send it on, it's for public consumption.

Brill, will do.

> I'm planning on going to the Weegie Techmeetup, so I'll see you there.

Great, look forward to saying hello. There'll be a message re venue /
date coming out soon.