On Friday the 10th of September 2010 Data.gov.uk’s Local Data Panel published their draft guidance for Local Authorities on how to comply with the Prime Minister’s commitment to to publish each item of local government spending £500 from January 2011. The guidance is available at:
http://data.gov.uk/blog/local-spending-data-guidance
I have been concerned by the poor examples of local council spending data being published which the government has been pointing to as examples of good practice. These have included Bedford, Barnet and Windsor councils none of which even include a description field explaining precisely what each payment was for.
The newly published guidance sets a sensible standard for the publication of financial information, councils following the guidance will need to provide description fields and details of which department in the council spent the money. What the government has previously cited as good practice falls well short of what the new guidelines demand.
While the guidance itself is good there are a couple of problems which need to be addressed. The draft guidance states “councils should publish to the minimum standards within 6 months of the publication of the guidance.” As we are already within 6 months of the start date for publication it appears there will not be an expectation that councils will follow the Local Data Panel’s guidance from day one. What we may see in January 2011 is a incomplete, badly presented and difficult to work with data being released by many councils. This will may result in the government’s commitment to financial openness in councils appearing much weaker than the Prime Minister’s commitment indicated and examples of completely inexplicable lines from accounts will be commonplace allowing the data release to be shown up as a farce by the media.
I recently spoke to Chris Taggert, who served as member of the Local Data Panel. He is widely credited with successfully lobbying for higher standards of data quality than might otherwise have ended up being described in the guidance. Mr Taggert told me that it was not expected that the guidance would be given made law, it would remain merely guidance.
I understand that one problem is some councils are claiming they will find it difficult to comply with a new law if it is too demanding. Councils currently may have inflexible contracts with accounting software providers or even have outsourced key parts of their accounting mechanisms. The Prime Minister has announced an ambitious target date of January 2011 for the publication of this information, I don’t think he should back down from ensuring the publication occurs in a meaningful and useful way on the grounds some councils are complaining about it and saying they can’t cope.
It is expected that there will be an Bill in the next few months which will seek to make local councils’ compliance with the Prime Minister’s requirement to publish each transaction over £500 the law. I think that Bill ought incorporate some, if not all, of the Local Data Panel’s guidance. I think the Bill ought make publication of the fields which the guidance describes as mandatory – exactly that – mandatory, and should go further and require the publication of the additional fields where they are available within the council’s accounting systems. I think that without the inclusion of a minimum standard for the publication of financial data any bill will not be as effective as it could be. In the comments below I have posted a draft letter to my MP, Julian Huppert, urging him to try and ensure that the local accounts data ought be published in a meaningful and usable manner by all councils from day one.
Redaction
One particular area of the guidance I would like to comment on, while it is still in a draft state, is redaction. I accept the need for some redaction, eg. to remove personal data and am impressed that the guidance requires redaction to be done transparently – ie. it should be clear where redaction has occurred. What I am suggesting is:
- A clear principle of only applying the minimal redaction necessary should be adopted. For example I suggest that even if the value of a payment under a contract is deemed exempt the fact that payments are made, to whom, and for what, ought not be redacted. To give another example, if a payment has been made to an individual in many cases it would be appropriate to release the value of the payment and the reason even if it was appropriate to redact the recipient’s identity. (eg. Lists of compensation payments and the reasons they were made ought be disclosed so far as is possible without disclosing personally identifiable information.)
- The standard for redaction ought be set with reference to material which could be obtained by inspecting the accounts in person under the provisions of the Audit Commission Act 1998 and not the Freedom of Information Act, the former gives the greater degree of access. It would be absurd if people were able to visit their council in person during the open periods for the accounts and fill in gaps in the data published online.
- Another option, rather than complete redaction of for example Salary/Pension/Severance spending would be to combine payments made to all staff within a section/department to avoid the disclosure of personal details but achieve the aim of making the overall spending public. Such entries should make clear the number of staff to which they refer. (When I viewed my local council’s accounts I was able to view salary costs under a particular cost centre, but not information relating to an identifiable individual). This is one example of an “aggregate entry” which I think ought be explicitly permitted by the specification (see below).
- Redactions could be flagged in the data. ie. there could be an additional field which could be populated only in the case of redactions; which could contain a categorisation of the reason for the redaction along the lines of the example reasons given in the draft guidance. ie. I am proposing a greater number of more precise reasons for redaction rather than merely personal data and commercial confidentiality.
Aggregate Entries
While not within the scope of the Prime Minister’s announcement I think it would be desirable to be able to calculate the total spending within the body as a whole by summing the items of expenditure. One way a council may wish to achieve this is though addition of aggregate items representing total amounts of all payments under £500 and total amounts of payments where the sum involved has been redacted. These lines could be added on a per department, or per cost-centre basis where that is compatible with the reasons for redaction.
While the guidance currently states “there is nothing to stop local authorities publishing all spending”; the guidance does not explicitly permit items which are in-fact aggregate entries. I think aggregate entries ought be permitted, but only in cases where the individual items would not otherwise be published due to redaction, or being below the threshold used. I would suggest adding specific approval for such aggregate items to the guidance to give those councils who are keen on publishing where all the money they spend on our behalf goes a way to achieve that while complying with the file specification produced.
Recommended Data
I understand that the guidance does not make some types of data mandatory on the grounds that not all councils will be able to provide it (eg. if they use alternative classification schemes to those mentioned in the recommendations); the guidance could be strengthened to require the publication of these fields if the council holds the information.
Each Financial Transaction
I believe there is an error in the blog post introducing the guidance at the moment; as it refers to the “Prime Minister’s call to publish each financial transaction…”. All that the Prime Minister committed to publish was spending data; “each financial transaction” is a much wider net which would catch payments being made to councils. As the title of the posting and the title of the guidance both clearly refer to spending this isn’t a major error.
See also:
14 responses to “Publication Standards for Local Government Spending Data”
I am considering writing the below draft letter to my Local MP:
If anyone has any suggested improvements, or would like to co-sign the letter do let me know.
None of the currently proposed measures tackles spending on councils’ behalf by contractors. In the future I would like to see local government contracts include requirements for bodies taking on councils’ responsibilities to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and other openness and transparency related measures – such as proactively publishing spending – in relation to activities councils would otherwise conduct directly themselves.
Richard
Good blog post. Just one point about the status of the guidance — i.e. whether it should be law or not. The problem as I understand it is, is that it is difficult to enact legislation that says roughly, ‘You must follow this guidance’. You can put the guidance in law, possibly even have it as a Statutory Instrument, but this means it becomes fixed, until there is the political will to enact new legislation (or SI).
Things are moving sufficiently fast that — to me — that’s a problem, and it becomes a particular problem should this or any other government lose its appetite for openness.
So the question is, how do we resolve this. I don’t have the answer.
My only suggestion is that we have guidance that has the force of opinion (i.e. ‘The most closed council in Britain’), and that can evolve to greater quality and higher levels of publication, back by a change in the FoI Act that requires data to be provided.
Thus the community could bombard recalcitrant councils with FoI requests, given them an incentive to do things the right way.
Whether this is feasible I don’t know, and I’m happy to have the debate about the best way to ensure the openness happens. Just concerned that enshrining it in law may not be the best way.
Chris,
Many thanks for your comment.
Perhaps the solution would be to have a few different levels:
ie. the absolute minimum a council must do should be defined in an Act; I think that minimum should be more than just “publish each item of spending over £500” and incorporate key elements of the proposed guidance eg. the “within 30 days” timescale. Further details of elements of the data format which the government wants to make mandatory could be made statutory within more readily up-datable secondary legislation.
A pointer to the guidance itsself could be included in the form of a provision requiring councils to consider it while determining their policies. While that latter strategy doesn’t actually require councils to follow the guidelines to the letter it does give those pushing for increased openness an extra lever as they can question why a council decided not to follow a particular aspect of the guidance when they considered it.
In my experience it is common for staff responsible for posting invoices on the accounting system to miss out the description field. This only becomes apparent when you try and run the type of report which councils will now be expected to produce.
Even where purchase ledger entries are full and complete, it may be the case that the invoice received from the supplier was not sufficiently detailed – e.g. it may say simply “charges in accordance with contract XYZ123” – which would not be particularly informative to the general public.
David,
The Prime Minister’s statement also promised greater transparency related to contracts he said:
As for description information not being included in the accounting system; in Cambridge this isn’t a problem as can be seen from the information I have obtained from them. While I consider a description a basic essential the lack of other information in accounting systems is a reason why it might take some time to make all the desirable fields compulsory.
It has been suggested to me that my main point, that the minimum specification ought become law, also applies to the central government guidance
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/transparency_spend_over25100910.pdf
I propose adding the following as the penultimate paragraph of my letter:
While watching Prime Minister’s Questions earlier I thought an MP had at last spotted the problem. Nicky Morgan, MP for, Loughborough, noted the public will want to know what their money has been spent on when information on public spending is required to be published next year.
Below is an extract from the Hansard draft:
A tweet from Nicky Morgan MP shortly after the question stated:
It appears she was not intending to draw attention to the fact that no description of what the money has been spent on is required, just details of who has received it. In Charnwood’s case it as they provide a “cost centre” and “account” there is enough information there to provide reasonable context, but while an “expense area” is a required field other council’s data won’t necessarily make as much sense.
http://www.charnwood.gov.uk/pages/publishing_local_authority_spend
I was intending to write to My MP, Julian Huppert, when this issue was about to be debated in Parliament or when a draft statutory instrument had been produced which I could ask him to comment on. It appears though that despite the Prime Minister’s commitment there might not be any plans to bring in any new law requiring the publication of local government spending data.
I have today written the below to Mr Huppert:
I found it surprising that the County Council recently refused to provide to the Cambridge News details of amounts spent on taxis, claiming it would take too long to tot up the figures.
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Taxpayers-funded-67k-of-taxi-bills-for-councils.htm
If taxi costs had their own line code in the accounting system then pulling out the total spend should be an incredibly quick and easy exercise. Most systems would also allow you to dump the data into Excel or another useful format.
This is the type of analysis that accountants working in well run businesses carry out on a daily basis.
I find it very concerning that the Council has such poor visibility on its costs. How can they expect to control these costs if they don’t know even how much they are spending?
No wonder they won’t proactively publish the information.
Mr Huppert has replied to me saying he has tabled a written question as I had suggested.
Brilliant MP.
My question, has now had a response from Bob Neill (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Communities and Local Government)
(View via TheyWorkForYou)
My interpretation of that is that it is saying there are no plans legislate to require the publication of each item of local government spending above £500 from January 2011 in line with the Prime Minister’s commitment on the matter.
A “Code of Recommended Practice” under section 2 of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 is proposed; though even this is just recommendation to publish, it doesn’t make publication a legal requirement.
I am concerned that come January what could have been a massive leap forward in openness and transparency, enabling people to make more informed comments on how their local councils are spending their money, will be a bit of a flop.
Cllr Andy Pellew had a written question on Cambridgshire County Council’s online publication of its spending answered for the 7th December 2010 Full Council meeting. Cllr Pellew had asked why the council wasn’t doing something of the things I have suggested above.
The council publishes the written answers on paper on the day of the meeting; but does not put them online for many weeks.
I’ve summarised the questions and answers rather than typing them all in verbatim (they’ll be online at some point):
Can the redacted recipients of money be given unique identifiers so we can group payments to the same entity?
Cllr Pellew noted that in October 2010 alone £1.6 million pounds had been spent by the council to entities with their identity redacted on the grounds them being personal or commercial data.
Cabinet member Conservative Cllr John Renyolds responded to say that supplier numbers were not published because of fear of fraud. He stated that other councils had been subject to fraudsters, armed with a supplier number, being able to get councils to change where they send payment.
Cllr Renyolds appeared to be suggesting that Cambrigeshire’s systems are susceptible to the same type of fraud saying “internal audit has asked us not to give out supplier numbers when asked for the same reason”.
Cllr Renyolds said “We will explore other ways of achieving this aim, but further guidance from government is expected in the new year which may prescribe a way forwards for all authorities”
Can the criteria under which commercial entities have had their identities redacted be supplied?
Cabinet member Conservative Cllr John Renyolds said the redacted data to-date all related to care establishments where vulnerable and abused children / young people have been placed. He explained publishing the name of the entity might mean the locations of the establishments could be identified. Cllr Renyolds said this would “inevitably” put the children / young people “at risk”.
Can we have a “changelog”
Cllr Renyolds said this would be explored further, and said changes to-date have been to the structure of the files as more guidance comes out. He added: “Government guidance awaited in the new year may be prescriptive on this so we will await this before finalising a solution,
Can the postcode of the entity be added to the data feeds?
Cllr Renyolds’s response started: “Information governance are considering this further however audit specifically advise against adding postcodes where the supplier name is redacted. Government guidance may be prescriptive on this in the next through months.”
(I think this is a terrible answer as clearly the request relates mainly to lines where addresses are un-redacted).
Can the total amount, not the breakdown, of spend under £500 be published as part of the feed?
Cllr Renyolds said: “A single line totalling all spend under £500 will be provided with the November data.”
Andy Allsopp, Cambridgeshire County Council’s Alistair Campbell, has recently been tweeting complaining about journalists making FOI requests for details of items of spending released.
He wrote:
http://twitter.com/andyallsopp/status/23427617424154624
I suspect the item enquired about might have been:
http://openlylocal.com/suppliers/41109-dream-clean-services-ltd
If it was that one, or one like it, doesn’t matter; the point is that had a description field been included then such enquiries would not be necessary and the data released much more informative.