From 1 January 2011, Councils in the UK are likely to be required to publish details of payments to suppliers over £500. Although some Councils have already started to publish this information, 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 note that users must have Java enabled on their machine. Download the latest free version of Java JRE
More than 70 Councils' expenses are already included including:
- Bedford Borough Council
- Blaby District Council
- Corby Borough Council
- Devon County Council
- Elmbridge Borough Council
- Greater London Authority
- Guildford Borough Council
- Hastings Borough Council
- King's Lynn & West Norfolk
- Lewes District Council
- London Borough of Barnet Council
- London Borough of Bromley Council
- London Borough of Islington Council
- London Borough of Richmond upon Thames Council
- Mid Sussex District Council
- Mole Valey District Council
- Preston City Council
- Reigate & Banstead Borough Council
- Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council
- Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead Council
- South Oxfordshire District Council
- Spelthorne Borough Council
- St Albans District Council
- Three Rivers District Council
- Vale of White Horse District Council
- Waverley Borough Council
- Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council
- Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council
- Woking Borough Council
In addition, BIOLAP also provides its full Council Expenses data set in a single downloadable CSV file format to enable users to re-use the data and to perform their own analysis. This is subject attribution licensing. To view the licensing terms and to download data, click on the link below:
For more information about this free service, please contact us or call us on +44 (01952) 456-453 or +44 (07785) 766-829
