Government vows to introduce greater transparency in local spending

Local public spending data will be made more accessible, under plans unveiled last week by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

A DCLG report to Parliament – Making local public expenditure data public and the development of Local Spending Reports – sets out the government's broader aims for streamlining local spending reports on public services and to make public data public in accordance with the Sustainable Communities Act 2007.

The report said: “It is critical that information on public expenditure should be clear, accessible and useful. We believe that spending by local authorities and other public bodies should be as transparent to deliver partners and local people as it can be.

“We want to make it easier for citizens to look right across all the local services in an area and spot evidence of duplication or waste, and hold providers to account.”

The report suggests that local spending reports should be web-based and open to all, and that information should be made available on the Local Data Exchange, with an analytical capability made available on the Places database. The DCLG said it wanted to go further than the publication of Comprehensive Area Assessment results on the Oneplace website and the Timely Information to Citizens project, which involves 20 local authority pilots on new approaches to giving citizens information.

“We want to try and open up the data we hold, so that it can be directly discovered and retrieved by third party systems; and work with leading innovators to develop new tools that show how data can be usefully integrated with information held at the local level,” it adds.

However, the DCLG also acknowledged that local spending reports should not impose significant costs in relation to their benefits, whether on local authorities, central government or other bodies.

The report proposes including additional information in the second Local Spending Report: expenditure in a local authority area by the Homes and Communities Agency; Housing Revenue Account Subsidy Payments and Receipts; and expenditure by UK Borders Agency on unaccompanies asylum seeking children and leaving care grants.

The DCLG added: “Most importantly, we see the provision of expenditure information in the longer term future as a product of data being exchange from all levels – the very local, the regional and the national – in a standards-based portal approach which allows everyone to examine that data against other information.”