🧵 It’s time for another roller-coaster thread digging into how one journalist has used company accounts* to get a great story.
This time it's a front page story by @Robert_Booth theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
*Featuring: other useful open sources
2/ The first par is a lesson in concrete writing which has some key factual statements we can start unpacking:
💸 £21m in payments
🎩 He is the "boss"/"owner"
🔎 Multiple breaches of rules
How did the reporter arrive at those facts? The answer isn't as simple as you might think
3/ How can we calculate how much a company boss earns? Normally a story like this relies on the company accounts' ‘notes to the accounts’ section on directors’ remuneration where payments to the highest paid director are disclosed. Those payments add up to £29m...
4/ (I pause at this point to say that the company accounts can be found on Companies House, in the 'Filing history' tab for the company: …te.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/007312… - you can check you have the right company by looking on their website for a company name & number)
5/ How do we know if the boss is the highest paid director at a company? In fact, we might not — and in the 2018 accounts it is explicitly stated that the highest paid director was *not* G G Sanders, the subject of Booth's story...
6/ ...Booth therefore doesn’t include most of those director payments in his headline £21m. He only includes the 2017 payment — with the other potential £10m mentioned in the penultimate par.
So how is the extra £18.6m found..?
theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
7/ ...The other place to find money going to a company owner is dividends: payments made to people who hold shares in a company.
You can find them in various places in the company accounts: the cash flow statement, the notes to the accounts, and the directors’ report.
8/ ...But how many shares does G G Sanders own? A good place to look for this information is on the last page of a company’s accounts, where the ‘controlling party’ is named.
Here is where we can find out that Sanders owns all the shares in each year — and the dividends
9/ ...The last page of a company's accounts also allows you to report that someone is the "owner" of the company.
Or: look on Companies House under the 'People' tab for a company — and then the 'Persons with significant control' tab …te.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/007312…
10/ So public info in company accounts on dividends and remuneration provides a 'scale' story on exec pay for @Robert_Booth (more on that and other common data angles at onlinejournalismblog.com/2020/08/11/her…)
— But there's a lot more to learn from how the core story is fleshed out...
11/ It’s one thing to report the scale of executive pay at a company — but why does that matter? Here Booth uses company accounts to provide the context of the scale of public money given to the company — alongside the total 💰 going to directors
12/ 'Why does exec pay matter' part 2 is those breaches of rules. At the CQC website you can find reports for care homes — and calculate what proportion of an operator’s homes are below a certain standard.
Start at cqc.org.uk/care-services — but be patient...
13/ The LONG way to find all a provider’s care home CQC ratings is to:
1️⃣Search for one of the homes operated by the company at cqc.org.uk/care-services
2️⃣Click on the ‘Provided and run by:’ link
3️⃣Click on ‘services’ to see all the ratings
But...
14/ ...Here's a search hack to get to a provider page on the CQC website: prefix your search with
site:cqc.org.uk/provider
inurl:services
And then add the keyword
google.com/search?q=site%…
Note: the URL above will be shortened so use the one at the link
15/ (Or, if you're able to, use CQC data at cqc.org.uk/about-us/trans… - thanks @owenboswarva)
@owenboswarva 16/ ...Individual reports are used in the article to provide more concrete descriptions of conditions in the homes - e.g. cqc.org.uk/location/1-131…
theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
17/ But the paragraph that really caught my eye in @Robert_Booth’s article was this, on two £4m+ properties the executive owned. How did he get these..? theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
18/ To trace a director’s property assets we might try Companies House again, and the director’s appointments page: most of this person’s directorships use the company address as the correspondence address, but there is an address in Essex… …te.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/kHKNx…
19/ 🔎...Once you've got an address from Companies House, Streetview and Zoopla can help establish what sort of location it is.
20/ ...But a correspondence address isn't proof that it's *owned* by the director in question.
To establish that, use the Land Registry to search for a property — once found, it's £3 to download the document which confirms it gov.uk/search-propert…
21/ ...Finding the second exec property is trickier — and here former MA Data Journalism student @Jarnavic steps in. He focuses on companies with a family connection: "In the filing history I found an address at a flat in London..."
@Jarnavic 22/ There's more open source wonder in @Robert_Booth's article, including the wages jobs are being advertised with (and how that compares to McDonalds) — but also, crucially, interviews and a (declined) right of reply theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
@Jarnavic @Robert_Booth 23/ ...and the last paragraph of Booth's piece is worth ending with here: it's not always going to be so easy to find the same info for other companies receiving public money for social care. theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
@Jarnavic @Robert_Booth For more threads looking at stories using company accounts see onlinejournalismblog.com/2021/12/03/her… and onlinejournalismblog.com/2021/05/28/her…
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