MPs' expenses, by amount, on a map: does distance matter?

Link to Tony Hirst's map

MPs and travel: now it's laid bare. Tony Hirst - to whom we referred yesterday - has been busy again with our data, this time creating a Google Map showing MPs, their constituencies, and their travel claims. A word of explanation on how it's done: take the travel expenses, which are coded by MP; remove the bedevilling £ sign and commas from the damn thing; then create a table of the MPs' names and travel expenses. Now comes the clever part. Get the MPs' names and postcodes from theyworkforyou.com, which has an API for precisely this task. Next, match the MPs' names to their postcodes. And now feed that into a Google Map, in which the colour of the pin depends on the level of expense: : Red: > £25,000; Pink: £20,000- £24,999; Yellow: £15,000- £19,999; Green: £10,000- £14,999; Blue: £5,000- £9,999; Purple: < £4,999.

You can see the map in its original form (or just click on the picture above).

A few things stand out: MPs living further away have larger expenses, generally; but there are a couple of standouts - specifically, Geoffrey Robinson of Coventry North West (£21,534) compared to, say, near-neighbour Jim Cunningham of Coventry South (£4,418); and Chris Grayling of Epsom & Ewell, whose £10,105 expenses look rather unusual amidst neighbours such as Vincent Cable of Twickenham (£1,680) or Crispin Blunt of Reigate (£3,123). (You can see the pushpin for Grayling peeping green in the bottom right amidst all the blues and purples clustered around London.) Note that we're not suggesting any malfeasance here; we'd just like to know why their expenses are so far out of whack compared to others. What would be fun would be a distance vs mode/mean/median analysis for travel and other expenses; for that we need to figure out the distance from MPs' constituencies to Parliament. (That shouldn't be too hard: we have the postcodes. And Google Maps and indeed Streetmap offer a distance conversion system..) Anyone up for it?

Update: You can see even more versions, also plotted on Google Maps, on Tony Hirst's own blog. We're starting to think that some combination of travel expense + amount claimed for second home might be indicative...

DATA: MP allowance claims

Can you do something with this data? Please post us your visualisations and mash-ups below or mail us at datastore@theguardian.com