DCLG lower their spending transparency threshold to £250

Good news for armchair auditors (and therefore taxpayers.) The Department for Communities and Local Government now publishes all items of spending over £250. The previous threshold was £500 which the DCLG has published since August 2010.

The lower threshold means that items such as travel expenses, publications, office supplies and mobile phone bills are more likely to come on the radar. Labour Ministers and their officials wined and dined at some of the finest restaurants in the country using the Government Procurement Card at taxpayers’ expense, including Boisdales, Somerset House, the National Gallery, the Wolseley and the Cinnamon Club and Sky City casino in New Zealand.

The Audit Commission’s wining and dining included taking out the National Audit Office for the finest meals and drinks, with the national spending watchdog reciprocating with fining dining for the Audit Commission. This spending watchdogs mutual dining included L’Escargot, Qurinale, Ebury Wine Bar, Wiltons and the Footstool.

Should councils have to publish procurement card spending?

The Brentwood Gazette has been investigating some of the spending items from Essex County Council's procurement card. The council has got through over £5 million of Council Taxpayers' money over the past two years, on what is effectively a corporate credit card. 757 of the council's 41,000 staff can make payments in this way.

The Gazette reports:

Council employees used public money to buy fast food, groceries, flowers, CDs, cinema and theatre tickets, cosmetics, clothing and alcohol between December 2009 and April 2, 2012.

The taxpayer also footed the bill for county court fines or fees, historic weapons, confectionery, dry cleaning, shoe repairs, hotel accommodation, theatre trips, ten-pin bowling and visits to bars and nightclubs.

In one case, an employee even dipped into the public purse to the tune of £13.03 to pay for access to Instant Messaging Virtual Universe, an online social game which bills itself as "the world's largest 3D chat and dress-up community".

Check councillor's allowances Pickles urges residents

Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles is encouraging residents to check the amount their local councillors are being paid in allowances.

Eric says:

"The public have every right to know  how their taxes are being spent and high levels of scrutiny  on councillor expenses can only be a good thing.

"Financial disclosure has been and continues to be, a powerful trigger in enabling  the public to see how councils are using public money, shining a spotlight on waste and establishing greater accountability and efficiency.

"Opening the books to the public should ensure we never return to the bad old days of secrecy that were so prevalent under Labour."

Councils resist publishing salaries over £58,200 a year

The Daily Telegraph has an amusing report this morning on some of the pleading spent in by Council bureucrats against publishing detils on on spending and senior staff salaries. One claim is that there would be no interest in such information - another that it would cause them to be flooded with "vexatious" queries.

Among the more imaginative objections was one from Nottingham City Council that "Staff safety could be put at risk if the public knew how much they were paid." Also a claim from Leeds City Council that "releasing information could breach intellectual property rights."

Then there was an Oldham Council with a touching concerns that they might be held less accountable to large spending items if the smaller ones were made public.

It said in a submission:

Wandsworth publish performance information

Cllr Ravi Govindia, the Leader of Wandsworth Council, on why he is publishing how his council performs against others in London

Residents should not need the mind of Poirot or the skills of a computer geek to find out the quality of local public services. Yet that is what I fear is beginning to happen as performance information becomes increasingly hard to find, often hidden within impenetrable spreadsheets or the deepest chasms of government websites.

This week Wandsworth is throwing open the cloak of secrecy that is in danger of emerging by launching ‘Open Council’ – a highly promoted section of our website where an army of local armchair auditors can easily contrast and compare how we are performing alongside other London boroughs.

The information covers everything from pupil progress in maths and English, the number of library books issued to the number of carers receiving support and the number of local roads in need of repair. It shows areas where improvement is needed, such as increasing the recycling rate across the borough.

We are doing this not because we are the best council in all areas, but because we want our residents to be able to get a complete picture on how their council performs across the range of services. They should not have to rely on piecemeal inspection reports in some areas or the drip drip of information that is often only promoted if the local council has got something to shout about.

Trafford start live online gritting map

Another innovative idea from Conservative-run Trafford Council. They have launched a new, online map showing residents where gritters are operating in.

Visitors to http://www.trafford.gov.uk/gritting can now view a map which shows where all the Council's gritters are located, with an update every 30 seconds. This allows residents to find gritters working in their area and follow their path so they can see exactly where it has been and at what time. Residents can also look back to see what happened the night before. I don't know how much it has cost to set up but I suspect it will save quite a bit of staff time dealing with queries.

Deputy Leader of the Council, Alex Williams said:

"Residents want to know that their roads are being maintained properly by the Council and this new service allows people to have up-to-the-minute information about how our gritters are operating across Trafford.

"This is part of our ongoing pledge to be the most transparent Metropolitan Council in the country, allowing our taxpayers free, quick and easy access to data showing how services are performing."

Hammersmith & Fulham publishes all spending - not just on procurement

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, for instance, you want to check how much the council is spending on lawyers it is necessary to know not only the spending on firms of solicitors and barristers but the total including the cost of its own staff lawyers.

So in Hammersmith and Fulham we now publish our "net spend by cost centre." This shows the quarterly spending for each section of the council. I think we need to do more work to make clear what all the terms mean, what each bit of the council does. But today's publication is important progress in ensuring we are the most transparent council in the country.

Publishing spending by cost centre is also something that the Mayor of London has done for his City Hall spending - although the data only covers last year.

Each council should publish a full list of job titles

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 money in lots of other areas – including self-congratulatory award ceremonies, as our research reveals  – and it’s hard to imagine many would have cut this service first if they weren’t facing the prospect of draconian targets and excessive taxes on landfill.

Fortnightly collections are the result of the EU Landfill Directive rather than spending reductions but today critics have argued that £250 million is a lot of money to stump up for weekly bin collections. It is a lot of money and I wish it didn’t have to be done in this way. I’d prefer to see councils tackling the really egregious budget lines so they could maintain their weekly collections. It would be much better if Eric Pickles didn’t have to compensate for EU-dictated taxes and regulations. But it is fair for taxpayers to feel they deserve weekly collections, given that council tax has doubled over the last decade, and this is the way to make it happen now.

Away from the bins story, the Department for Communities and Local Government also released their Code of Recommended Practice for Local Authorities on Data Transparency this week. It’s likely to get less attention than Pickles’ announcements today, but it’s an important document. When the department consulted on this, the TaxPayers’ Alliance made a key recommendation:

All bodies listed under the Code’s scope – and those the TPA recommends the scope should extend to – should publish a full list of job titles and job descriptions. No salary information or names need to be published alongside this for junior staff; a simple list of jobs and job descriptions is all that is necessary. It is crucial that public bodies let taxpayers know exactly what work they are doing as staff time is often a more significant commitment than payments to suppliers. Job descriptions would allow for a more informed debate over the council’s priorities and the requirement to publish would encourage more care in recruitment and staff allocation.

One blogger has cost Barnet Council £40,000 in FOI requests

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 seen the FOI requests it is difficult to cast judgment.

But it does seem that the cost is unnecessarily high. Perhaps there should be a restriction where anyone making an FOI should be obliged to indicate that they had already requested the information less formally and been turned down.

Sometimes it is a matter of the information being already on the Council's  website and their being difficulty finding it. Often I am struggling in this regard navigating the websites of different councils. The first step should be to ring up the Council and ask for help from someone in the relevant department. A formal FOI request is something that council's feel obliged to make heavy weather of - lots of flaffing around with senior officials approving draft responses. Sometimes it could have been sorted out with a five minute phone conversation with a junior member of staff telling you what to click.

Trafford leads the race to publish every penny it spends

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 one of the most transparent Councils in the country.

We are committed to leading the way on transparency so we are making data about all public spending freely available, allowing our residents to see how we spend every penny of their money.

Our Council has already proved  to be a frontrunner in making data available in a usable format and was recently named in the top ten of 434 authorities described as having 'truly open' data, usable for comparative analysis.