back to article Pickles throws down gauntlet on council data

Eric Pickles has told more than 200 "slow coach councils" that they must put spending data online or face the consequences. The local government secretary reminded them that they have until the end of January to publish data about spending of £500 or more. This includes publishing details of senior pay and councillor expenses …

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  1. g e

    Not THAT open

    Warwickshire CC has lines in the CSV saying REDACTED

    1. Kibble
      Grenade

      Can't wait to see

      all the reasons councils will throw up to prevent having to list expenditures online. I suspect that the redactions in their reports will take a while to address. (Reasons versus excuses!)

  2. Winkypop Silver badge
    Joke

    Put spending data online....

    Why bother?

    Why not just resort to the tried and trusted method of leaving some USB sticks/laptops on trains, etc?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Pickles

    Well, we all know Eric Pickles is massively in favour of slimming down

    (sorry)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The full picture

    A shame the published data won't include figures for the brown envelope money that seems to drive a great deal of council spending, particularly in IT and construction. The desperately poor quality of a great deal of the work done suggests plenty of councillors are supplementing their already plump expenses at the expense of those they are alleged to serve.

    1. JimC

      > desperately poor quality of work

      You don't think that could be anything to do with the Councils being required to accept the lowest bidder from the private sector do you?

  5. mrs doyle

    reply from the inside...

    http://localdata.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/?p=351 I hope Eric has time to read this link, its a brilliant post from people on the inside...

  6. Steve Evans

    Ummm...

    So this would be the same Eric "Fatty" Pickles, who's constituency is Brentwood & Ongar... The same Brentwood who's tory controlled council has made such a mess of their accounts that they couldn't get them signed off and got audited?

    http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk/news/Council-facing-heavy-accounts/article-2853704-detail/article.html

    It starts at home Eric!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Unhappy

      MP not councillor

      Eric Pickles is the MP for Brentwood. He's not a councillor. That's said it is a bit embarrassing for a Tory controlled council to be unable to do their accounts, but thats more a sign of the quality of the CEO and staff than the actual Tory councillors. You'd be surprised how little control of council spending councillors have. Councils are controlled and run by the CEO, councillors only provide a veneer of democracy.

    2. Luther Blissett

      MP not the Red Queen

      from Alice of course. Nor Genghis Khan for that matter.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Data needs context

    Unless the data has some kind of context I don't see the point of it.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    You see, it really is a strange old thing?

    It is a bit funny this Council as employees and Council as elected members thing.

    This sometimes leads to mistakenly blaming elected members for long term conduct of Council employees.

    It is also a bit funny this Council as local government powers/authority and local services provider.

    This sometimes leads to conundrums like Council powers side would like to take action on Council service provisioning side but cannot do it because someone said a Council cannot act against itself.

    It is made funnier and stranger still by this "we know best. We are local!" that seems to let Councils indulge far too much on should be forbidden indulgences.

    It makes for obfuscation and cloudy clarity and some are prepared to take advantage of that or so it seems.

    1. Elmer Phud

      Conductors

      Here in wonderful Barnet we have possibly the original model for the 'Easy Council'. For years the services were sold off, cut back and privatised purely to be able to say 'We haven't raised the Council Tax'.

      The person responsibe has now got his just rewards and is happily away from it all as an MP for Thatcherland, having first given his mate Dave the C a prime example of scorched earth council.

      Pickles is under the impression that there is some extra dosh haning around that hasn't been spent but it's all gone on Brian Coleman's taxi fares and defence in various courts when hauled up for bullying residents. That and buying new laptops less than 2 years after re-stocking.

      Mr Pickles -- it's your fucking mates that have shitted it all away in search of the 'Tory Wet Dream', to be lowest cost anything, to the point of not owning anything. We already have the prime example of 'Big Society' where local services have been hacked to death over the past few years and any support groups are dwinding fast.

      THERE IS NO MONEY STUFFED UNDER THE MATTRESS, GRANNY'S GOLD TEETH HVE GONE AND SHE'S NOW OUT ON THE GAME.

      ps, can we see your Greggs recipts?

  9. Just Thinking

    Endemic waste

    Our council recently sent out a flyer to advise us of the bin collection days over Christmas. Its A5, high quality, full colour and printed on heavy, coated card. Die cut as a door hanger (wtf) with rounded corners. It is a quality piece of work. I would like my business cards to be that good if I could afford it. What is wrong with printing this information on paper in B/W? Irony is, due to a light dusting of snow, they didn't collect on the right days anyway.

    This week they fixed the playgound opposite our house. Basically they removed about 10 wooden planks which had rotted, and bolted in new replacements. There were 2 lorries and 6 blokes there for a DAY AND A HALF. You don't believe me? Neither would I if I hadn't seen it. The planks still need to be painted. Some are red, some are yellow and some are blue so it will be another 6 blokes I guess.

    The council are on a different planet, nothing is going to change.

    1. Red Bren
      FAIL

      My council did something similar

      They sent me a letter and A6 sticky label with collection dates for garden waste over the next 12 months. The letter also detailed changes to the refuse collection service over the festive season. I received it yesterday!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Standard replies?

    Council #1: the Council has a responsibility to ensure that public money is used effectively

    Standard response

    Then publish the wages of senior council employees and meet request from Rt. Hon. Eric Pickles M.P.

    By the way my take is: Councils are over managed with far too many staff at managerial rank. This then weighs in as too hefty a wage bill further reducing effective frontline services and Council funded stuff.

    Remember reassurances of the ConDemz that cuts to frontline services will be minimised? Has any local authority made assessment of essential, non-essential services and used that as a basis to restructure in order to go forward with a legal budget?

    (No, I thought not)

    ps: in above assessment criteria I consider management as a non-essential frontline service and relegate it to having both essential/non-essential support service status that needs to be finely identified.

    1. Colin Millar
      Thumb Down

      Knee-jerk crap

      If you consider management to be a non-essential service in a multi-million pund turnover, multi-service public organisation then you probably work in a sweetie shop.

  11. despairing citizen
    Big Brother

    Cost Benefit Analisys?

    Given how much the publication of the information is going to cost, are we going to see a return on investment in cash?,

    rather than in politician sound bite oportunities?

    1. Intractable Potsherd

      But...

      ... there needs to be an adequate assessment of how much management is too much. It is hard not to look at the multitude of managers in public organisations and wonder whether they really are necessary, and whether their wage might be better spent in actually providing the service to those that need it.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    I know it is difficult

    ... but rather than willy-nilly job losses and arbitrary frontline service provision losses it is far better for all parties for the cuts to be:

    a - frontline service will be retained as best as possible

    b - non-essential "support" will be the loss area

    c - no public employee post to be paid more than PM

    d - ring fenced individuals to face reality

    d: a scale 10 doing a post valued at scale 7 is not justifiable

    c: seems reasonable enough

    b: ditto

    a: ditto

    The thing is too much harm can come about by improper job losses and (usually) job loss criteria needs to be explained to all parties including trade unions in a fair, open, sincere and honest way (but those are values most Council's seem abhorrent to anyway?)

    1. Rebecca 1
      Grenade

      Not to be paid more than PM?

      Does that include just his actual pay, or all pay and benefits (a central London pad, mansion, cars, foreign travel and holidays with celebrities)?

      1. Intractable Potsherd

        In my opinion...

        ... yes, it should only be the actual pay. The rest is something else that we as a country need to address at a later date. So, no council employee to be paid a salary more than the PM in pure financial terms as published (and even then, I think it is too much by far).

  13. Theunis Viljoen

    Council Expenses Dashboard

    BIOLAP has details of more than 130 Councils' payments to suppliers over £500 on its free Council Expenses Dashboard at - http://www.biolap.co.uk/index.php/councilexpenses.html

    Users can slice and dice a Council's data, compare it to spend by other Councils and sort the data by value of spend, as well as drill through to the underlying transactions.

    BIOLAP is a BI Consultancy practice specialising in Planning, Analysis and Reporting solutions.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re:> desperately poor quality of work

    yes, and having a crap SAP implementation thrown in...you'd think it wouldn't be too difficult a task to run off a report of all vendor transactions transactions greater than 500 quid for a given period would you?

  15. John Diffenthal
    Big Brother

    Redaction isn't much of an escape route

    Contractually sensitive information (eg daily rates for consultants) can be redacted under FOI rules but sole traders will be identified and so will the payments to them assuming that they are for more than £500 since although they are individuals, they have a commercial rather than a personal relationship with the Council. Essentially, anything that could expect a comprehensive answer under existing FOI rules relating to spend, contracts and tenders should be available for data relating to 1 January 2011 and onwards.

    If you have concerns about data which is currently redacted then make an FOI request to the Council. If you don't get a satisfactory response then bring in the Commissioner.

    The point about making comparisons across different Councils is that the results may be less useful than is currently hoped. We know with precision how much we have paid to a particular supplier over any period you care to specify and which department(s) authorised the spend, but the nature of the spend and its cost coding is much more problematic. Invoices rarely describe the goods or services accurately and the person coding the transaction to the system frequently lacks the detailed knowledge of the people who may be working with the contract day to day.

  16. VSL

    Fatty Pickles to cut down on waist

    Surely a much better new year's resolution for the porcine head of local government.

    Must have been a slow news day for The Register - regurgitating verbatim Millbank handouts smacks of desperation.

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