Council's financial details to go online

From January, the borough council will be required to publish figures on its website for thousands of payments over the £500 minimum threshold.

Tory councillor Tony Mannion welcomed the move this week, insisting that any chance to scrutinise council spending should be seized upon.

He added: "The council have spent far too much in the past on some crazy schemes.

"I think there is an interest out there in what is being spent and, in these days of austerity, people are going to want to know that the areas which the council is spending money on are the areas where the public want it spending."

A report to councillors said that the process would involve scrutinising thousands of payments every month to decide whether they should be made public or kept secret because of restrictions under the Data Protection Act.

Officers have proposed bringing in external data analyst, Spikes Cavell, which already works with the council on its purchasing system, to deal with analysing the payments.

Stuart Booth, the council's director of central finance, said in the report, which was due to be presented to councilors today, that the new openness policy had been introduced by the coalition Government and could later be extended to include the publication of salaries.

The report said: "As part of its Open Data agenda, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government wrote to all local authorities committing them to publish items of spending over £500 including tenders, contracts and actual payments by January 2011.

"The Government has also recently announced its intention to publish certain information on salaries by this date.

"To achieve the internal publication of payment data on a monthly basis would require directorates (council departments), working with Financial Services, to define and assign a supplier classification to approximately 16,500 existing supplier records, as well as any new suppliers.

"In addition, there is a requirement to examine every payment record and redact any personal information to comply with Data Protection legislation.”

The report proposed that Spikes Cavell could be employed to manage the publication of the figures online through "an intuitive and easy to use" program on the council's website.

The council’s Cabinet member for resources, Cllr Ken Wyatt. told a council meeting:

“There is a huge amount of work involved with this and in my opinion £500 is too low.

“It's a logical idea but the amount is far too low for an authority of this size, but the council is not only seeking to comply with that, but to get started early.”