Data Transparency Statement

Where our data comes from, and what to do if a council published your name

Compair AI Limited. 9 September 2026.

If a council published your name, start here

Write to privacy@compairai.com with the name as it appears and, if you know them, the council and the year. You do not have to give a reason, or tell us anything about yourself beyond what we need to find the rows.

We reply within 5 working days and take the name out within one month. It stops appearing in every report, list and search. The money stays in the totals as an unnamed amount, so no council’s figures are understated by our removing you. We rebuild the whole dataset from councils' files at every release, and a person re-applies each removal. If your name ever comes back, tell us and we will put it right.

What we cannot do. We cannot take your name off your council’s own website. We will tell you which council published it and where, so you can ask them too.

Why you are reading this rather than a letter. A council published your name in its own spending data and we collected what it published. We did not get your name from you, and you were probably never told: the section on our lawful basis says why we did not write.

Who we are

Compair AI Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 16732731, registered office Apartment 205, 2 Wollstonecraft Street, London N1C 4BT. Write to privacy@compairai.com.

We decide what to collect, how to standardise it and how to show it, so the law makes us the controller of this data in our own right, not a processor working for a council.

Where the data comes from

English councils have to publish their own spending: under the Local Government Transparency Code 2015, every payment over £500 and a register of their contracts.

We download what a council has already published, over ordinary web requests, with no password and no account on any council system. We keep every file exactly as it arrived, so we can show a council that what we hold is what it published. No council gives us data.

Four other public sources feed the product: Companies House, the Charity Commission register, Find a Tender, and population and deprivation figures from the Office for National Statistics and MHCLG. Nothing about anyone who uses Compair is ever sent to them.

Councils publish under the Open Government Licence, which covers the data as a dataset. It does not license personal data. For rows that name a person there is no licence at all, and our position rests on data protection law alone. A council publishing your name is not you publishing it.

What personal data is inside it

A limited company’s name is not personal data. A sole trader’s is: the business is the individual, so the name identifies them. So does the name of a landlord paid rent or a carer paid for care.

On the release the product is serving today, 495 of the supplier names we hold begin with a personal title, such as Mr, Mrs or Dr, and carry no company word. Each is counted once, however often it appears.

That is a floor and not a total: it cannot see somebody published as initials and a surname, and there are thousands of those, so the real number is higher and we do not know it. Ask privacy@compairai.com for the rule behind the figure and we will send it in full. No comparable company publishes a number like this.

Why we may hold it, and why we did not write to you

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: making the public record of how councils spend public money comparable, so that it can be examined. That is what the duty to publish exists for.

We have weighed that against you. The data is already public, we publish nothing a council did not publish first, we add nothing about a person from a commercial source, and there is no export from the product. Against that, you did not choose to be published and may not know that you were.

Article 14 of the UK GDPR normally expects us to tell each person directly. We rely on the exemption for disproportionate effort: the product is built from tens of millions of published payment lines, and in almost every case we hold a name and no way to reach you, no address, no email address and no telephone number.

What we do to the data, and what we never do

Every file lands as the council wrote it. We then make the same thing mean the same thing whichever council wrote it: department and category names are mapped to a standard set, and a supplier name is matched to a registered company where one matches.

The name your council published is the one we keep, and we never change it. What you see on screen is not always that name: where a published name matched a registered company, most report pages show the company’s registered name instead. We are bringing the published spelling onto the screen beside it, and search already matches it.

Where a council published a redaction instead of a name, we show “Name withheld by council” and keep the label. We never try to work out who is behind a redaction.

We never fill a blank. Where a council published nothing, the product says the council published nothing: it does not report zero and it does not guess, and we never infer a name a council chose not to publish. We buy nothing from a data broker. We do not use this data to train any model, we do not sell it and we do not license it on.

We hold no health, ethnicity or religion data, nothing that records an offence, and no invoice descriptions. Where a council has named somebody against a service such as adult social care, the name and the service together could say something about that person. We do not add to the row, and we treat any request about one as an objection.

People who work for councils

No council officer’s name, job title, work email address or telephone number reaches the product. Not one table we serve has a column for any of them. We collect no supplier contact details, beyond registered office addresses that come with a Companies House record and that no page shows. Some councils publish contact details inside the supplier name in their own contract register: 8,919 rows at 29 councils carry a contact name, and 172 rows at 10 councils carry an email address. We show every row exactly as the council published it.

The files as councils published them are different: some name a responsible officer inside their own contract register, and some of those files carry email addresses. We keep them as published, as evidence of what was published, and where one appears in a field we show, it appears as published. We never write to it. If you are named in your own council’s register and would rather we did not hold that file, write to privacy@compairai.com.

If you are a council

Write to privacy@compairai.com. We will correct a mapping, change or drop a source we are collecting from, tell you what we hold from you, and act on a request you make for somebody you named. What we cannot do is take your published spending out of the record: it is your own publication under a statutory duty. If a figure is wrong we will fix it. If it is right we will keep it.

Where it is held, and how long

Everything the product serves is held in Microsoft’s UK South region. The raw files as councils published them sit in Microsoft 365, and we have not confirmed which country that is.

Three suppliers outside that estate reach this data. GitHub holds our source code, which has at times carried published supplier names in working files. Anthropic supplies the AI assistant we build with. Google Workspace runs our email, so a supplier name reaches Google if somebody emails us one. Stripe and Framer never see a supplier name. Nobody else does, apart from where the law requires disclosure, our professional advisers, and a buyer if the business is sold.

The product serves the five most recent financial years, and every figure names the release it came from. If your council corrects a row, our next collection picks it up. We keep the raw files for as long as we operate, as evidence of what was published.

Your rights, and how to complain

You can ask what we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, have us stop while a question is settled, and object. Objecting is the fastest route, and the top of this page is how. We reply within 5 working days and answer within one month, with no fee.

If you are unhappy, you can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113, and you do not have to come to us first.

The other two pages are the privacy notice and the terms of service.