Public money spent on our behalf should be open to the highest scrutiny.

HM Government requires all local authorities to publish records of expenditure in excess of £500, but does not mandate what form this should be. BANES chooses to make this information available quarterly as a csv file, requiring some work to reveal the information in an accessible form. These have been indexed and sorted to make them easier to view and are  here .

This does not include pending expenditure, so public tender records are used, not through the Council, but through central government records. These take some untangling but we are able to see  some of the money spent and about to be spent in our name, where it goes and who benefits.

Note too, that there is no requirement on Counciis to publish records of income so it is not possible to establish any kind of Balance Sheet. Income could include grants from central government, rents, asset sales, services sales and so on. Direct project grants (e.g. ‘Pothole Money’ from Government could also be regarded as income. But of course Government money is still public money, and still expenditure of our taxes, so is worthy of equal scrutiny.

While the data is taken verbatim from original sources, (UK Government Contracts and commercial aggregating sites, some of the data appears unfeasible, especially some astronomical contract values so should be treated with caution.

There is a separate page detailing Councillors’ remuneration, by way of a system of allowances.

Sources

BANES Quarterly Expenditure

Warning! The following contain a lot of data and can be slow to load.

UK Government source information for contracts  for the last few years. The table is searchable.    

Proactis public contracts information sources (Also shows pending tenders)

 

 

Information is provided here under the Open Government Licence for Public Sector Information.