Councils can publish more spending information 2

Chris Daniel Better Government

When asked by the Department for Communities and Local Government to publish all spending to suppliers over £500, all but Nottingham City Council did so. Of those that did, there are still some issues regarding how the data is put online.

This degree of transparency is still in its infancy though, and will hopefully become more efficient and more meaningful in some areas. After all, allowing residents to properly analyse spending without having to wade through a maze of indecipherable data is the whole point.

Some councils are going beyond the £500 limit. Hammersmith and Fulham have recently published all spending, not just to suppliers and not just over £500. They have acknowledged the benefit of this exercise to taxpayers and ultimately to the council themselves.

While they admit there are limitations to the data at this early stage, it is undoubtedly a big undertaking and one which we would encourage all other councils to follow.

Chris Daniel

Chris is a Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, focussing on local government spending. His work in this area includes papers on trade union funding and our Town Hall Rich List.

Follow @the_tpa

Anonymous

1. All publishing needs to be published.

What you will see is council’s splitting spending to under the 500 pound limit and doing more transactions to avoid the need to publish. If its all transactions, that goes away

2. For payments to companies, the name, VAT number, and company number needs to be published. That is along with the addresses

3. For payments to individuals, names and postcodes need to be published.

It should be a condition of receiving public money that the details will be made available. If you don’t like it, don’t accept public cash.

That way lots of the scams can be exposed. Companies -> directors -> councillors -> register of interests -> fraud if not there.
Anonymous

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Councils will now start to duck the £500 limit.

If it were not so sad it would be silly. OUr govenrment need radicaly reform to allow us to remove these cretinous whelps permanently. Very few are value for money, none are worth what they pay themselves (find me another organisation where ‘payment’ is not only compulsary, forced on threat of imprisonment but also endlessly hiked, only provided by one group which has no actual contract and legal obligation to provide services at all). So we must be able to remove them, revoke their pensions and remind these people that they are our servants.

Far from telephone number salaries and ever increasing nonsense costs we should pay these people the minimum wage until they demonstrate that they understand their place.