Publication on council spending on payments to suppliers on items over £500 has been a great breakthrough for accountability and transparency in our Town Halls. A growing number of councils are using Spikes Cavell's Spotlight on Spend facility to make it intelligible. But most spending is not on procurement it is on salaries. So if, […]
John O'Connell, Research Director of the Taxpayers Alliance, says the transparency requirements on Town Halls should go further Eric Pickles has announced plans to help councils return to weekly rubbish collections today. Waste collection is the key service that many taxpayers pay for when they hand over their big council tax bills. Councils needlessly waste […]
Public Service reports that one blogger has cost Barnet Council nearly £40,000 for Freedom of Information requests over a six month period. Cllr Daniel Thomas, Deputy Leader of the council, says the average cost is £225 and that one individual has issued 175 FOI requests. The Council says some of them are vexatious. Not having […]
Trafford Council's Deputy Leader, Cllr Alex Williams, on extending transparency Trafford's Conservative Council has just published details of all spending with suppliers. Like practically all other authorities, Trafford has for some time published payments over £500. However, it is the first Metropolitan Council to publish ALL payments, irrespective of value, building on it's reputation as […]
Further to the recent report in the Sunday Telegraph that councils own £250 billion of assets, the Department for Communities and Local Government have now published a public property map listing state owned assets of land and buildings. It is a work in progress. Thus far there is information from only a minority of local […]
Cllr Keith Barrow, the leader of Shropshire County Council, on how his council is embracing transparency In Shropshire we are committed to being open and transparent about our use of public money. Since last October we have published every payment made to individuals and companies over £500. We have now published new information that adds […]
As recently as Sunday we reported how Labour-run Nottingham was holding out as the only council in England to keep its spending secret. Another Labour-run local authority is now in trouble, this time for trying to keep its massive spending on members allowances under wraps. The authority concerned is the Merseyside Integrated Transport Authority (MITA), […]
A new online search engine has been launched which shows local taxpayers when they can inspect their council's detailed financial spending and ledgers as part of greater public transparency. Every council is required by law to make its accounts available to the public for 20 days a year. This includes every invoice, payment and receipt […]
In his speech to CIPFA last week, the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles included the following attack on Barnet Council. The relevant section went as follows: Take the example of Islington. An independent audit of just 30 of the council's top 500 suppliers found that many invoices had even been paid two or even three times […]
Cllr. Susan Hall, Leader of the Conservative Opposition on Harrow Council, chronicles Labour's resistance to transparency in her borough. Harrow Council’s Labour administration has just marked its first year in power; a year in which it has done more to undermine the transparency agenda than any other council in the country. Working against transparency isn’t […]
Sometimes councillors assume that putting webcasting or audio available of Council meetings will produce a negligible audience. This is because few members of the public usually attend Council meetings. However Kirklees Council have notched up online viewing figures of 14,000 since they introduced it a year ago.That is the cumulative figure for lots of meetings […]
By Jonathan IsabyFollow Jonathan on Twitter The Daily Telegraph this morning runs a story about how councils have been spending money on taxpayer-funded credit cards, based on Freedom of Information requests answered by 186 authorities. It reports: Despite being ordered to cut spending by almost 30 per cent, town hall chiefs have continued to lavish […]
Alok Sharma is Conservative MP for Reading West. Earlier this year, the Conservative-led coalition running Reading Borough Council since May 2010 discovered that the former Labour administration had spent an eye-watering £1.4million of council tax payers’ money over the last 12 years paying the salaries of three full-time union officials. This caused a real stir […]
While the requirement to publish procurement spending on items over £500 is a great advance it only covers a minority of Council spending. Most of the money goes on staff. So we need to know not just how many staff a Council employs but to know what they do. This is something that the Government […]
By Jonathan Isaby ConservativeHome has already covered how Labour-run Nottingham Council is the only authority in the country refusing to publish online all spending over £500 (see here and here, for instance). And the shadow leader of the Commons, Hilary Benn, has already indicated his support for Nottingham's intransigence. Today, the shadow communities and local […]