Local authorities to publish details of spending over £500
Mark Frary | Jun 07, 2010 | Comments 1
Local authorities are being urged to publish details online of all their spending over £500 in a standardised format by January 2011 in order for them to become more open with how they spend taxpayers’ money.
The proposed guidelines, being jointly prepared by the Department of Communities and Local Government and the Local Government Association, will see councils expected to make details of spending on all goods and services – including travel spend – that fall above a £500 threshold available for the public to see and scrutinise by September 2010. By January 2011, councils should be publishing invitations to tender for any project costing more than £500.
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said: “The public should be able to see where their money goes and what it delivers. The swift and simple changes we are calling for today will unleash an army of armchair auditors and quite rightly make those charged with doling out the pennies stop and think twice about whether they are getting value for money.
“Throwing open the council books will open the door to new businesses and encourage greater innovation and entrepreneurism. Organisations that might have been effectively locked out before, including voluntary sector and small business, will be in a much stronger position to pitch for contracts and bring new ideas and solutions to the table.”
Baroness Eaton, Chairman of the Local Government Association said: “Local government is absolutely committed to the highest standards of transparency. Councils have been leading the way in giving taxpayers real, detailed and vital information about how their money is spent. All public bodies must be scrutinised for the spending decisions they make, and the LGA will work with councils to pioneer an approach of openness and accountability.”
The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (pictured) is one local government authority that is already publishing its payments over £500.
In June guidelines on how to standardise the publication of these details will be published at the government’s new open data project website at www.data.gov.uk for comment and debate. In September, draft Codes of Practice on payments and tenders over £500 will be published for formal consultation. Final Codes of Practice will be published in November for implementation by January 2011.
On Friday, the Government announced that it was opening up the Treasury’s Combined Online Information System (COINS) database to the public. The database is used by the Treasury to make budgeting decisions and comprises 24 million lines of information.
Filed Under: News
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Although some Councils have already started to publish details of payments to suppliers over £500, there is obviously a reticense to develop costly reporting solutions. Councils therefore appear to publish the information in downloadable format either as Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents. Although this may ‘tick’ the required disclosure requirements, we do not believe that this provides real value to the public.
Information such as this only has real value if it can be viewed in context (i.e. is a payment normal or abnormal). For a user to be able to make this interpretation, they may need to be able to look at spend in a month for a particular expense category against similar spend in previous periods or against other categories.