By Lucy Phillips
19 November 2010
The details of all government spending over £25,000 were published today as part of the coalition’s transparency and efficiency drive.
The online database shows all Whitehall transactions above this amount between May, when the coalition came to power, and September this year. Some departments, including Communities and Local Government, have published details of all spending over £500.
The move is part of a government push to encourage ‘armchair auditors’, to scrutinise spending in place of watchdogs such as the Audit Commission, which is being abolished in 2012.
But Colin Talbot, professor of public policy at Manchester Business School, described the intention as ‘fairly fanciful’. ‘You will get armchair nitpickers and nutters... Certain individuals will go on about their particular bugbears,’ he told Public Finance.
He was sceptical that ordinary people would have the time or resources to deal with the wealth of data. ‘An awful lot of this is going to be either irrelevant or will take a lot of digging to put into context and uncover what it’s all about... The chances that Joe or Joanna Public is going to be able to do any serious work with this is pretty nonsensical,’ he said.
Publishing the data, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said he wanted the UK to have the ‘most transparent and accountable government in the world’. He added: ‘I want the public to hold us to account for what we do – and by publishing this data today, taxpayers will be able to see exactly how we spend their money. This will not always be easy but we expect the public to hold our feet to the fire and make sure that not a penny of their money is wasted.’
Departments will now publish the data on a monthly basis while local authorities will be required to publish all spending over £500 from January.
One hundred councils have already done this, it was also announced today. Local government Baroness Hanham said: ‘We are already seeing how useful public data can be in everyday life, from moving home to choosing schools. The public have a right to see what their tax money is doing.’
Talbot added that the main problem with understanding how the government spends its money because Spending Reviews, Budgets, finance reviews and departmental accounts are presented in different formats, making it ‘impossible to track through spending decisions’.
He added: ‘It’s impossible for serious analysts to understand what is going on with public finances in the way we would want to.’
