My Council Are Hiding Spending!

Foggster

Well the first problem Powys has is all the Welsh/English documentation that they have to send out. I say "have to" loosely, because I would happily have all my documents in English.

I would love to know what the saving would be if they allowed people to opt in or out of having their information in one language only. I think the cost saving would be significant.

Then there are all the road signs and markings that have to be done twice, once in English and again in Welsh.

Now before you cross the county to hunt me down, I am pro Welsh language but I cant help but sigh and shake my head each time anything comes through my door in dual language. This goes for Welsh Water and the madness of the DVLA! My log book and driving licence are responsible for 1 tree at least!!!

boozercruiser

Foggster wrote: »

Well the first problem Powys has is all the Welsh/English documentation that they have to send out. I say "have to" loosely, because I would happily have all my documents in English.

I would love to know what the saving would be if they allowed people to opt in or out of having their information in one language only. I think the cost saving would be significant.

Then there are all the road signs and markings that have to be done twice, once in English and again in Welsh.

Now before you cross the county to hunt me down, I am pro Welsh language but I cant help but sigh and shake my head each time anything comes through my door in dual language. This goes for Welsh Water and the madness of the DVLA! My log book and driving licence are responsible for 1 tree at least!!!

Being English but living in lovely Wales for the last seven years I totally agree with you.:T

I would only hunt you down to buy you a pint if your a Bloke or give you a hug if you are a Woman!:rotfl:

uk-tyler

How much do you think your requests for this information is costing the council?

Every DPA request costs money in the time spent on it. With staff cuts at councils everywhere you are actually adding to the tax burden. How many hours will it take for the staff to respond?

Is that fair on other people in your area who pay tax?

I'm not a lover of the way councils spend, but I suspect you are doing more harm than good.

The_Unready

uk-tyler wrote: »

How much do you think your requests for this information is costing the council?

Every DPA request costs money in the time spent on it. With staff cuts at councils everywhere you are actually adding to the tax burden. How many hours will it take for the staff to respond?

Is that fair on other people in your area who pay tax?

I'm not a lover of the way councils spend, but I suspect you are doing more harm than good.

Lucky we didn't all take that attitude with the MPs' expenses debacle.

We'd never have known about the duck houses and porno films!

The Unready

boozercruiser

uk-tyler wrote: »

How much do you think your requests for this information is costing the council?

Every DPA request costs money in the time spent on it. With staff cuts at councils everywhere you are actually adding to the tax burden. How many hours will it take for the staff to respond?

Is that fair on other people in your area who pay tax?

I'm not a lover of the way councils spend, but I suspect you are doing more harm than good.

The F.O.I. has a limit of £450 for each request. If a person gets his/her information weather it is money oriented or not then this is money well spent.

This is the only way that ordinary people can get to the bottom of exactly what Councils and Government are up to. We would never have got to find out about MPs expences only for an F.O.I. request.

The ones doing the harm in our society are the ones who rule us that want to hide everything away.

F.O.I. money is good money spent I say.:D

It makes THEM think twice about what THEY spend OUR money on!:D

I go and look at footy now......money well spent I say!

boozercruiser

The_Unready wrote: »

Lucky we didn't all take that attitude with the MPs' expenses debacle.

We'd never have known about the duck houses and porno films!

The Unready

Here Here as the 'ossers in the 'owses of parliment say!:rotfl:

boozercruiser

Find Your Local government expenditure over £500 using below link.

The Communities and Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles, has called on councils to provide financial transparency by publishing spending information over £500 online by January 2011.
All but 1 council has published their spending information.
You can find out about which local authorities have published their spend data by using the Local Directgov council expenditure over £500 search (external link).
If you have any queries about adding your expenditure link onto the Local Directgov council expenditure over £500 search, please contact [EMAIL="localdirectgov@communities.gsi.gov.uk"]Local Directgov[/EMAIL] (email link).

Local council spending over £500: full list of who has published what

With the deadline for publication over we see 293 of the 326 English councils have published their spending over £500

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Eric Pickles: 'We still have a mountain to climb.' Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features

It was a defining moment of last year's open data revolution, when in June Sir Eric Pickles informed local authorities that they should publish items of spending over £500 by January 2011.
Now, with the January deadline passed, we see the Communities and Local Government website shows 293 of the 326 English councils have published their spending over £500.
The authorities will have worked their way through a succession of different advice and guidance. The latest guidance is from the local government transparency group. Previous to this the local data panel put together guidance on the data.gov.uk site. With different groups forming and producing their own advice, you can see why some councils are left uncertain about what and how to publish their spending.
However sticking to the common features in these guidelines helps to make the data easier to gather and analyse, and people are keen to do this. Take for example Chris Taggart from Openly Local. Taggart, who has so far imported 91 councils' spending, that is £6,543,052,419.51 of council spending in 892,784 transactions, finds the value of the data is in matching up suppliers with well defined companies in the Open Corporates database. So far he has matched 28,854 suppliers to companies. You can download the monster zipped CSV file of well organised council spending data from the footer of the Openly Local page. Although you won't be able to open this file in a spreadsheet, the data is valuable to programmers with an application in mind.
Unfortunately much of the local spending data does need time consuming attention to detail such as that Taggart has paid.
How could the quality of the data be imporved? Frequently when a central government body gathers data from local authorities they send out a spreadsheet template and ask the local finance team to complete it. This has been the case for the Whole of Government Accounts and the Revenue Outturn. It isn't clear why this approach to data gathering has not been used for gathering the local spending data.
However even with the various trickiness around gathering data from local authority websites, we are keeping track of the councils from up and down the country. You can see the latecomers submit their data with the interactive timeline on the Communities and Local Government website visualisation:

Starrystarrynight

Wish I had the time to scrutinise my council's expenditure, but I've got much better things to do.
I like the sound of comparing one authority's spending on a specific issue with another similar size authority, but the names of the companies or people the funds are paid to aren't really that relevant.

real1314

Starrystarrynight wrote: »

Wish I had the time to scrutinise my council's expenditure, but I've got much better things to do.
I like the sound of comparing one authority's spending on a specific issue with another similar size authority, but the names of the companies or people the funds are paid to aren't really that relevant.

I bet none of the people stamping their feet over council spending have ever bothered to read the audit reports for their council from cover to cover.

What's more they would probably find more relevant assesment of spending than comparing what council A spent on clothing against what council B spent. :cool:

Foggster

real1314 wrote: »

I bet none of the people stamping their feet over council spending have ever bothered to read the audit reports for their council from cover to cover.

What's more they would probably find more relevant assesment of spending than comparing what council A spent on clothing against what council B spent. :cool:

ooo yes I have because that was my job!!

Interesting though that the external auditors had a de minimis level of between £0.5m - £5m+ depending on the size of the Council. So the "over £500" didnt even figure in the sample let alone get looked at unless it had a few more 0s after it.;)