LGA to assess transparency costs
Author: Ruth Keeling, LGC |
Plans to assess the cost to councils of the government’s transparency agenda are not yet underway, although the LGA has pledged they soon will be.
A week after an influential group of MPs criticised councils and other public bodies for dumping large amounts of data on the public, the membership body for councils pledged it was on the brink of commissioning work to put a price on the cost of publishing spending data.
In a report last week, the public accounts committee called on the government to undertake a formal assessment of the costs and benefits of the requirement that government departments and public bodies publish data on what they spend.
Giving evidence to the committee in May, LGA chief executive Carolyn Downs said that there was a need to understand the costs of publications and said the association would be doing so.
?We will be doing that,? Ms Downs said. ?We have just commissioned work to do precisely that, to understand the cost and the benefit.?
However, an LGA spokesman this week confirmed the work had actually not yet been commissioned.
?[The work] hasn’t been commissioned yet but the plan is to get it underway,? the spokesman said. ?We are in the process of commissioning it so we have to draft out the specification and go out to tender.?
The spokesman said there wasn’t a specific timetable for the tender.
In her evidence session, Ms Downs said the demand for council spending data should be assessed alongside the costs.
?I imagine the cost of providing the data might be quite marginal, but if the cost is great and four or five people a year are hitting the data, I just don’t think it is useful.?
However, that view was challenged by Conservative committee member Matthew Hancock.
?It could depend on who those four or five are, couldn’t it?? he said. ?If one is a national journalist and it ends up being promulgated further indirectly ? i.e. not from the [council] website ? then that is important. It has to be a wider consideration than just the number of hits.?