Council objections to publication of spending data
Last week it was announced that so far fewer than half of England's councils had started publishing the spending data which the government wants them to disclose.
Ministers have given local authorities a deadline of the end of January to issue online the details of their expenditure on items over £500. The Communities and Local Government department maintains a timeline to display progress towards this.
But documents obtained by the BBC under freedom of information show some councils have protested to the department about this demand from central government.
East Dorset council opposed the plan, complaining that "this will create work to comply with and...add no value at all." Its chief executive David McIntosh wrote: "Rather it is only likely to result in requests and therefore further work when the few people who bother to look at it ask for further clarification."
Mr McIntosh also called for the Freedom of Information Act to be revisited. His letter stated: "It's initial and laudable aim was to allow individuals to access information held about them by public authorities. In practise it is mainly used by companies, contractors, consultancies, students, employees, journalists and the public to access information for commercial, academic, editorial, or other purposes."
(Apart from the grammatical and spelling errors, Mr McIntosh is also wrong on the initial aim of the FOI Act. The law which gives individuals access to information about themselves is actually the Data Protection Act.)
Other councils which objected included Stoke-on-Trent which said the scheme "will increase paperwork and process" and Cornwall which said it "will require a disproportionate increase in resource".
Similarly Roger Tetstall, chief executive of Test Valley, told CLG that "the requirement to publish 'items of spend over £500' will result in significant amounts of staff time being wasted on dealing with frivolous, vexatious and idiosyncratic enquiries".
Wyre Council was another opponent. Its then chief executive Jim Corry also called for the government to "ban Freedom of Information requests from commercial companies as they are not in the public interest and waste valuable staff resources".
Some authorities did not object in principle to publishing spending data, but were unhappy about the threshold of £500. These included Gloucester, Newark & Sherwood, and Haringey.
Alan Jarrett, Deputy Leader of Medway Council, also questioned the £500 criterion: "I envisage that the resultant enquiries (both general and FOI) will be excessive and possibly vexatious, and will not assist public accountability."
Waverley Council was worried about other aspects of the department's transparency plans, expressing concerns for example about the idea of publishing online the details of licensing applications.
Its leader Robert Knowles wrote: "My worry is that the current drive towards transparency, while a sound political principle, must not be taken to an extreme, in which councils are spending large sums on processing and publishing information for which there is no local demand."
However it should be noted that these councils which told CLG of their objections or reservations about the government's openness agenda are only a small minority of over 240 which expressed views on how to reduce administrative burdens on local authorities.
In contrast there are many authorities which are highly enthusiastic, while there are certainly others who may not be keen but accept this is the way the wind is blowing and feel there is little point in protesting.
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Just a small step towards clamping down corruption and iniquity
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There's corruption in local councils but the worst corruption is at the top. The hogwash about those in government being unaware of the banking bubble that Robert Peston says may be leading to more accountability among the power elite is about as credible as NIST'S explanation of the collapse of the twin towers.
Mark Twain said, "Those who don't read papers are uninformed those who do are ill-informed."
90% at least of the material published today belongs in the toilet as Brome's bumm fodder.
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They love the word 'vexatious', don't they?
What's really vexatious is the frittering away of taxpayer's money without transparency and accountability, of course.
Perhaps it would be simpler for the Local Authorities if the £500 limit were removed, then all expenditure could be put online - easy to do cheaply and automatically, unless they're using some overpriced proprietary silo accounting package.
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I agree that ALL expenditure should be put online - after all, it is our money and I suspect there is as much fiddling on items below £500 as above. Also, with the way things are, some contractors or suppliers could be putting in several invoices at less than £500 each to bury the reality.
Our local council does publish its data but, for example, it has a payee category called "Business Partner" which appears often - with no indication at all of what this means. I shall be asking - is that vexatious?
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As someone who is in charge of attempting to deliver this project there has been one major flaw. No one is against the idea in our authority but the issues is how we make the data useful to those who want to analyse it rather than just a block of meaningless numbers. The Minister praised Windsor and Maidenhead council for publishing their data but all they did was upload an excel spreadsheet. This did nothing for transparency. If it is to be truly useful all data needs to be in the same format and ideally with the ability to be 'mashed up'. The Department for communities and Local Government keeps promising guidelines (which we hoped/expected to provide us with the suggested format that would make sure that all data could be scraped and analysed in the same way. We are still waiting for this. So now we have a half baked, hotch potch of different ways in which local authorities have published their data which now renders the whole purpose of doing it in the first place meaningless and now means that it is a huge waste of time and money as no one will benefit from this data dump.
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My local council and county have invoices from similar suppliers for similar amounts but how can I tell that these were for similar quantities of goods or services? Did what they get represent value for money? Was it even neccesary in the first place?
You simply cannot tell from what has been published.
Just a long list of meaningless numbers which are almost completely useless other than to show the number of invoices over 500 pounds and the company paid and which internal budget it came from.
Doesn't tell you a thing about relevance or value for money obtained from that expenditure, there was a body which did that - Audit commision I believe it was called but some idiot has decided to scrap it.
The only thing this exercise does it appears is cost money for it to be done - our council has even spent money on a natty web company to make pretty graphics from it. Great I can tell how much was spent by building services but not why or what was obtained from the expenditure.
As ever the real waste and corruption stories will come from the time honoured tradition of council employees informing to the local or national media because they can see it in context. The public will I suspect add nothing from this exercise.
Perhaps I will ask them to collate how many enquiries about items published they receive, sure that would be a good use of my council tax money? Or perhaps the minister would care to publish the precise number of links made to councils from his ministry's website month by month, just to see how may actually are being looked at and at what cost - so a value for money exercise can be carried out.
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I'm a little surprised a Chief Exec who one would assume checked up on the issue managed to so confuse the purposes of the FOI with the DPA. I work in Data Protection, and before I did I would assume the same as the public, that requesting info about themselves is a FOI request, but not a good sign when the man at the top makes a fundamental error like that; it makes it harder to accept valid points if he makes them.
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They love the word 'vexatious', don't they?
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Heh, true.
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It is just a massive gimmick,
Westminster council have just published screeds of payments - without context it is just a not very clever way of deliberately obscuring what expenditure it is for.
All in all it is another Con by this tory led government to pretend it is on the side of the citizen when all it wants to protect is those with power and wealth.
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"I agree that ALL expenditure should be put online - after all, it is our money and I suspect there is as much fiddling on items below £500 as above."
So long as you're willing to pay for the admin and bureaucracy it will entail.
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"So long as you're willing to pay for the admin and bureaucracy it will entail."
doing something that commmon sense says should always have been done anyway, as part of being a public-funded body, should not be an excuse for any extra bureaucracy, it should just be a job requirement for anyone authorised to spend a single penny of funds raised by taxation. No extra bureaucracy needed. No extra costs involved. Just common sense.
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I'm surprised at the BBC saying they obtained these documents under an FOI, as they were all freely available on the Department for Communities & Local Government website, where I read them along with all the other correspondence between local authorities and Eric Pickles on the matter a few weeks back.
In terms of the comments about the use of the word "vexatious", it is because it is part of a specific phrase in the Freedom Of Information Act, which is supposed to help limit the amount of time public bodies have to spend replying to requests, where they would take up considerable amounts of staff time or cost a large sum of money. As an accountant in local government, I and my team have had to spend huge amounts of time responding to FOI requests, so I can tell you that unfortunately it doesn't tend to be used. Many of the requests are from journalists who want us to do their research for them, and I have seen little evidence of them being used by local people wanting public accountability of decisions made or money spent.
In terms of the listing all items over £500, I have been very disappointed by Eric Pickles' comments about the number of local authorities not complying, as the deadline was the end of January and people are working towards achieving it. This is despite the lack of clarification from DCLG on the layout and format, including some recent discussions even on the file type (CSV files had been requested initially, but numbers are hard to read as they don't show thousand separators).
As has been commented, the data LA's have been requested to produce won't give any indication of what the payment was for, just how much and to whom, hence the real concern that anyone who does look at one of these documents will end up submitting FOI requests in order to get that further detail. And why won't that be on there automatically? Because the documents will be produced by extracting the information from a financial ledger system, and whichever one the particular LA uses, it won't record the reason for the payment, expect for a code selected from a list which gives the broad expenditure category.
One of the other queries raised with Mr Pickles has been the difference in the amount LA's have been told to include (over £500) and the £25,000 limit set for central government departments. If we are going to have real transparency, the same level should be set for both local and central government, and it should be a realistic level.
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Contrary to some posters, I don't think exposure of corruption is the issue here.
I do think there is an issue of waste of resources. Some of this is from the touchy feely p. c. wellbeing c..p hosed out onto local government by the last lot, which so far shows little sign of diminishing. There is also the spending on local projects which sometimes seem to be about prestige, not local needs.
Maintaining schools,roads and footpaths, keeping the streets clean, and looking after the needs of the elderly and infirm should always come before the discretionary spending. Public toilets should become obligatory.
I simply do not believe it is difficult to open the books to show every item of expenditure. The info is already be available to officers and councillors to enable expenditure to be controlled.
I think this is about unwillingness to be scrutinised; if there's nothing to hide, then show us. There will be questions- and so there should be, its our money. I also think where possible spend should be shown against the ward or civil parish involved. We might get some real interest then from the chargepayers.
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And another thing...
Simply listing payments is utterly useless to anybody. Somebody must have authorised the expenditure, so the purpose of it must be known.
And.... we should be able to see what income is received, and from where.
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viewfromabove is absolutely right. Since all this data must be sitting in a compter system somewhere, it must be very easy to publish it all as is, or to have a query system that is simple for the user - not such a difficult interface to build in my opinion
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How about some comparison with how well central government is doing? No response from Pickles to the request that he reveal how much his department spent on legal fees defending a smear against the chair of the electoral commission.
In other news, the department for Transport is sitting on a multitude of FOI requests which have exceeded their statutory 20 day limit.
People in glass houses!
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