aurora's blog: Local council spending over �500: full list of who has published what so far

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Local council spending over �500: full list of who has published what so far

Ask every local authority in England to publish all its spending over �500 in an open format and what do you get? A whole load of PDFs. See our list of the best and the worst
? Get the data

It's an open data revolution. Every one of the 326 local authorities in England has to publish every item of spending over �500 by the end of this year.

In the event, only 66 councils have put their data online so far - despite huge pressure from the DCLG, which published its own spending data yesterday. It's worth reading is reading Chris Taggart's piece on this yesterday

Birmingham ? published theirs as a PDF on a confusing and messy page. However, not only is it not reusable as data without manually extracting it from the PDF file, there's none of the richness of the Trafford council data. No department names, no supplier ids, no descriptions of what the payment was for, and no classification. Comparison by category or by department is therefore impossible. They also seem to have silently redacted information, meaning that it's impossible to challenge whether a payment to supplier should have been redacted, as you'll never know it was made

The Liberal-Conservative coalition government has been pretty explicit about what it expects. First the prime minister David Cameron wrote a letter to government departments in which he told them he expected to see government to:

ensure that any data published is made available in an open format so that it can be re-used by third parties

In case there's any doubt, that means excel or CSV files or even XML. Then Eric Pickles told all local authorities in England (he has no authority over Scotland and Wales) that

I don't expect everyone to get it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it

In September, the government published its guidance for local authorities. See the guidance here.

Councils have until January to comply but in the meantime, a number have already started to release their data. But it's not quite working out.

It should be a fantastic journalistic resource. In theory, councils will publish their data so that we can compare how they spend their money and pick up on the good and bad in public spending.

We wanted to start listing all the councils that have complied so far - and give you the links so you could check for yourself.

And what it shows is a disturbing lack of awareness among councils as to what they're doing. Of the 66 councils in England who have published so far:

? Many - 36% at last analysis - have published their spending in PDF format only, including East Herts, Broxtowe, Fareham and Hammersmith & Fulham
? Some are available in monthly, some are annual and some are quarterly - making it difficult to compare different councils. One, East Herts, publishes them weekly
? Most of them are Conservative councils
? A quarter of them are from London and the South East
? A number of councils have published their data using Spotlight on Spend, a service from Spikes Cavell which was controversial earlier this year because of a perceived lack of openness

The PDF issue is the biggest problem. While PDFs are fine for displaying documents, they are the worst possible format for any kind of analysis - publishing on PDF allows you to appear open without actually being open.

The Department for Communities and Local Government plans to publish full guidelines which will tell councils how to do this in the next few days. "The deadline is not until January," says a spokesman adding that open data formats will be expected. "We want this to be the case for all data."

In the meantime, we will monitor councils right here, adding more as they publish. If you know of any, please let us know in the comment field below. The spreadsheet is attached too, so let us know if you perform any analysis.