Data health

Whether this record is working, and what it can't see. If a source breaks, we would rather tell you than show you last month's version of the town without saying so.

Where the data comes from

What this record cannot see

Every archive has holes. These are the ones we know about:

• Council payments under £250 — Not published. Hastings Borough Council publishes every supplier payment over £250, so the spending page is a floor: smaller payments, and what the council receives, are not on the record.
• Public contracts before August 2026 — Partly visible. Contract notices are collected from both national services — Contracts Finder (below-threshold) and Find a Tender (above-threshold) — but only from when collection began; earlier contracts are not on the record. Below-threshold notices reach Contracts Finder at the buyer's discretion, and Find a Tender notices state where their organisations are based rather than where work is delivered, so a contract performed in Hastings by a non-Hastings firm for a non-Hastings body is invisible to us. A Hastings firm appointed to a multi-supplier framework is also not counted: the published value there is the whole framework's ceiling, and no share of it can honestly be attributed to one firm. The money page shows what we hold and says so.
• Grants filed under a wider area — Counted nowhere. We include a grant when the funder recorded it against Hastings. Money that reached the town but was filed under East Sussex, the South East or nationally is invisible to us, which is why the money page shows a minimum rather than a total.

How we handle being wrong

Corrections are made in place, with a note saying what changed, and they are logged on the about page.