Transparency Policy: Fareham Borough Council now list third party payments - in invisible document!

By MrsGarland1 | Sunday, October 11, 2009, 21:37

As part of the Council's policy to be transparent, information about all third party payments of over £500 is now available on the Fareham Borough Council's website.

The Council has used supplier categorisation to group together similar types of spending, such as construction, utilities, consultancy, HR agencies, and listed them in descending value order in each category, making it much clearer for us to see where our money is being spent.

However – I have looked at the website, and consulted with PR, and it appears that this list is so transparent that noone can find it! If you can spot it on the Council’s Website please let me know...

Executive Leader of Fareham Borough Council, Councillor Seán Woodward, said: "We have always strived to be open and transparent and one of the ways we are achieving this is by continuing to publish service expenditure and members allowances on the website. The council is now going even further by publishing its third-party supplier payments for public scrutiny. I hope this will also be found particularly useful by local businesses who wish to tender for Council work."

The annual review of Fareham Borough Council's finance strategy goes before the Executive for approval on Monday 12th October. The strategy outlines the broad principles on which the management of the council's finances are based and provides background information regarding the level of resources, the revenue budget and the capital programme.

The Strategy explains the measures currently underway, and further steps that are planned during the strategy period, to ensure that council tax increases are maintained within acceptable limits and in accordance with the Council's corporate priorities.

Councillor Woodward added: "Fareham Borough Council has been able to keep council tax below the level of inflation for six consecutive years by making the best use of technology to be more efficient and effective."

The draft finance strategy and details of the council's budget and expenditure can be found on the website. (Apparently – but can’t find that either!)

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Hi all

At the risk of sounding like I am trying to promote ;(

I am running a conference on this topic on 7th December in central London. It will address the practicalities of transparency (good and bad) and look to the next stage- sharing best practice examples.

This is a DCLG partnered conference so some really fantastic speakers. Maybe check out the agenda and feedback to me? http://tinyurl.com/39dqcwq

Kindest regards

Katie Gilroy
katie.gilroy@neilstewartassociates.co.uk

By katiegilroy at 13:00 on 19/10/10
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Although some Councils have already started to publish details of payments to suppliers over £500., there is obviously a reticense to develop costly reporting solutions. Councils therefore appear to publish the information in downloadable format either as Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents. Although this may 'tick' the required disclosure requirements, we do not believe that this provides real value to the public.

Information such as this only has real value if it can be viewed in context (i.e. is a payment normal or abnormal). For a user to be able to make this interpretation, they may need to be able to look at spend in a month for a particular expense category against similar spend in previous periods or against other categories.

BIOLAP has developed an application, driven by arcplan technology, that we will provide to Councils free of charge to allow members of the public to analyse expenditure, slice and dice information and drill through to the underlying transactions.

Please feel free to try out our Free Council Expenses Dashboard at -
http://tinyurl.com/2dhxx6w

Let's hope Fareham opts to be included as well!

By tviljoen at 16:49 on 24/08/10
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Just to point out that the link to the document is now on the front page of Fareham Borough Council's Website:

tinyurl.com/yh3rhle

By TinaGarner at 22:45 on 27/10/09
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Lol - that's very funny!
Thank you very much for starting my Monday off with a giggle.
Tina

By TinaGarner at 09:53 on 12/10/09
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The payments document is on Fareham council's website - it's mentioned on
tinyurl.com/ygoa588
which links to the full document at tinyurl.com/yk5fvs4

But it's not easy to find! You can just imagine the conversation in some ivory tower in the council HQ:
"Smithers, we need to publish this payments document so the council taxpayers can see where their money is going."
"But, sir, if we do that, they might ask questions!"
"Hmmm, see what you mean. Ok, publish it anyway, but hide it awa in some obscure corner."
"But they might still search the website for it."
"Ah, but we've already taken care of that. All search results already appear off the bottom of the page, so it appears that all search queries return no results at all!"
"Oh, sir, that's genius...!"

By SCBlake at 22:51 on 11/10/09
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