Nottingham could be only council not to release spending data
According to the Communities and Local Government department, there are eight councils in England which have not yet complied with the ministerial demand that they publish details of all items of spending over £500. However one of these authorities claims that CLG is wrong and it has issued the information.
The CLG website contains a list of 346 authorities that have released the data with links to their sites. For some reason the website doesn't actually identify the few which haven't - but the department says they are Nottingham, Bradford, Peterborough, Epsom and Ewell, Hyndburn, Nuneaton and Bedworth, Eastbourne and Lincolnshire.
This is not so much naming and shaming, as shaming by not naming.
The BBC has contacted the eight councils involved. Nuneaton and Bedworth maintains the material has in fact been available on its website for about three weeks.
Bradford, Hyndburn and Peterborough say they will publish it during this week. Eastbourne, Epsom and Ewell, and Lincolnshire say they will do so by the end of February.
If this happens that will leave Nottingham as the only local authority determined to resist the government's request. The council's deputy leader Graham Chapman said:
"We have said that we will publish accounts over £500 if it becomes a legal requirement to do so. We are happy for information to be transparently available for public scrutiny but feel that the time and money needed to implement this change is wasteful and a distraction at a time when we are coping with £60million of cuts in government funding. The government talks about localism but as this issue shows, it seems intent on interfering at every opportunity."
If Nottingham is the only council maintaining this stance, it will be interesting to see how it withstands the pressure and inevitable accusations of secrecy.
The CLG statement was released as part of the next stage in the local transparency drive being pursued by the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles.
He has today launched a consultation document on a new code of practice on local authority data. Councils could now be asked to issue an organisational chart with the names and responsibilities of staff paid over £58,200, which is equivalent to the lowest pay band for senior civil servants.
The draft code also refers to releasing datasets on contracts, councillor expenses, voluntary sector grants and the democratic running of the council.
Some local authorities will be happy to follow this agenda, but there are others who will not be pleased by some of those proposals.
Several councils have already made it clear that they regarded the publication of the spending data over £500 as a bureaucratic exercise with little practical benefit, and they may well be unenthusiastic about these further demands.
This unease featured in an earlier CLG consultation which asked councils for details of what they considered to be unnecessary administrative burdens. Under freedom of information the BBC has obtained from CLG a copy of the summary of responses [68KB PDF].
This report identifies 13 councils with concerns about issuing the spending data. It also names 49 councils who complained about the level or nature of enquiries stemming from the Freedom of Information Act. (The document gives a figure of 52, but this is an error due to double-counting).
However by far the most common protest from authorities was about the data they have to provide to central government, and how they are audited and inspected. There were 152 councils with objections to the monitoring requirements they are subject to.
Some councils however apparently had more unusual complaints about the administrative burdens imposed on them. These included bonfire regulations (raised by East Devon), the out-of-hours stray dog service (Harborough), and the requirement to have four-year election periods (Gravesham).
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I'm with Nottingham on this.
I live in Breckland in Norfolk. So although I am not really interested I thought I would see just what wonderful nuggets of information I could glean by having access to this data.
The CLG link to the Breckland site produces an "oops page not found" page so that was hopeless.
The Norfolk County Council link worked and I was able to download a spreadsheet file for January 2011. Fabulous. I now know that they paid 10,700 invoices in January. This included over £1m to BT Global Services (3 invoices). And over £2m to Kier Eastern. I've only got another 10,666 to check. And then what?
Local Authorities are subject to all sorts of audit scrutiny (some of which will end up as an extra fee in this list in future as a result of the bonkers decision to scrap the NAO) so the purpose of publishing this meaningless list is completely beyond me. I know that they (Local Authorities) complain about the level of audit but that's tough - they are spending public money and someone has to watch over them. The expenses scandal at Westminster proved that.
I suggest Mr Pickles does something worthwhile with his time rather than this sort of nonsense.
And for the sake of transparency I do not work for and never have worked for a local authority. I'm just a Council Tax payer.
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When The GLA did this I wanted to know why Boris employed so many temps from agencies. He should go in with the City of London and run an internal or sub contracted bureaus (as the NHS units do for nursing)
In Manchester of 58M 37M was spent on construction presumably on tendered contacts. However I have not yet sorted the figures by supplier/type of purchase.
Has Mr Pickles posted his department's yet and can we see how many coffee machine suppliers he has?
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I think it's worth commenting on this from my own perspective. Local authorities in Northern Ireland are much smaller than their English counterparts. But FOI here? It is nothing more than a tool for lazy journalism. Let me give you an example we received not so long ago from a regional "news"paper:
Under FOI can you tell me:
what equipment has been bought by the council?; was it fit for purpose?; if it was not, what happened to it?; if it was re-sold, how much was it sold for?
Now, we (rightly) sent it back with a polite version of get lost. No time frame, no focus, no nothing - did she want to know about spades and BIC pens?? FOI has it's place, but just remember, every daft "journalist" question and every private sector "how much do you spend on...." question is time wasted by people.
Just as an aside, I recently sent an FOI to the BBC on the amount that it spends on photography for this entire website, and if such services were tendered. Surely you'd think a cost centre and a series of dates would be easily sorted? No. Couldn't do.
I'd suggest the BBC gets its house in order before reporting on this...
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As a Nottingham City Council tax payer, contrary to what the deputy leader might say about cuts and priorities I would be more than happy for Nottingham City Council to spend a bit of my taxes on telling me where they've spent the rest of it.
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"I suggest Mr Pickles does something worthwhile with his time rather than this sort of nonsense."
"Has Mr Pickles posted his department's yet and can we see how many coffee machine suppliers he has?"
"I'd suggest the BBC gets its house in order before reporting on this.."
Monitor IP address' much ?
Anyhoo - I can't see how this can be a bad thing. To complain that the people who pay your wages and fund the expenditure have sight of where the money goes seems somewhat.... secretive.
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Much of the data obviously isn't going to be much good for someone downloading the spreadsheet, but websites like http://www.openlylocal.com/ are making a good start on processing the data to be analysed. It's not easy, and there's a lot of data still not freely available (like companies house information) that needs to be.
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Trust us down in East Devon to complain about bonfire regulations! But seriously, I can't see why they feel it's such a problem for the councils. Surely they should have cost records anyway?
@paulfromnornin "I'd suggest the BBC gets its house in order before reporting on this..." I wouldn't. I feel it is much better that the BBC reports on an issue than not.
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ah this so reminds me of working for one of the then Water Authorities and later the National Rivers Authority... if we had a flat tyre somewhere out in the field we were allowed to have it repaired and claim it back as an expense IF it was less than 5 GBP. For anything 5 GBP or over we had to get three written quotes first... even out there in the middle of nowhere or the middle of the night... and of course all that without cell phones... and then back at the office spend a couple of hours filling in the paperwork and getting the required signatures afterwards. The cost of transparency and all paid for by the taxpayer..
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I am all in favour of openess, but do wonder what planet Eric Pickles lives on. Asking councils to report on all expenditure over £500 is nonsense. It would have been far better to have a realistic figure like £5,000. This day and age £500 is little more than petty cash.
What a waste of council resources when they are being asked to look at every penny.
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If you want to know more about the dispute between the government and Nottingham City Council over this issue, there was a report about it on The Politics Show last Sunday.
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Slightly off thread, but still with Councils:
Brent Council has been found to have attempted to silence one of its former employees through the use of a "gagging clause" within a compromise agreement. The info, in the paragraph which begins "In relation to the second part...." seems to have been carefully buried within the standard 'denial' text:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/total_annual_figures_for_comprom_34#incoming-151034
Like Cheshire West and Chester Council before them, they are in a small minority. The ongoing research on WDTK entitled "Total Annual Figures For Compromise Agreements, etc" reveals that 229 English Councils have responded since 1st January 2011, but only 2 have admitted to this practice.
Over 100 councils are still to respond in full, but an educated guess would be that amongst the stragglers, there could be some more yet to be chased out into the open.
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