Residents First

Council publishes quarterly spending report

Britain’s most transparent council is now publishing quarterly reports on its detailed spending for each of its services.

Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council has become the first in the country to let taxpayers view these detailed budget data, exposing its spending decisions to open public scrutiny to a degree never seen before in local government.

While it has become routine for councils to publish their spending with suppliers, that only accounts for a minority of councils’ spending. H&F’s initiative goes further. By publishing details of its own spending in each service area, H&F council has become the first to provide a transparent quarterly view of the full picture.

H&F has been leading the move to greater transparency and already publishes a wealth of information online, including:

   senior staff salaries,
   councillors’ allowances,
   planning agreements (Section 106),
   the council’s asset register,
   all payments to suppliers over £500,
   departmental structure charts,
   answers to Freedom of Information Act enquiries,
   audio recordings of all council meetings.

Up-to-date information in all these categories is published at www.lbhf.gov.uk/transparency.

Council publishes Section 106 agreements

In another coup for Britain’s most transparent local authority, Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council has become one of the first in the country to let residents view outstanding ‘Section 106’ funds online.

A Section 106 agreement sees a local authority strike an agreement with a developer to provide a contribution to make any necessary improvements in a neighbourhood where development is due to take
place.

Examples of contributions include funds to be spent on highways, recreational facilities, education and new housing to support new large scale developments.

By visiting the council’s dedicated transparency pages at www.lbhf.gov.uk/transparency, residents can now view outstanding Section 106 funds and the purposes for which they are identified.

H&F Council, a recent LGC Council of the Year, has led the way in openness and transparency and last year became one of the first authorities to put all spending above £500 online. In addition, taxpayers can also view senior officer salaries, details of all councillors’ expenses, the borough’s asset register and departmental organisation charts.

Minister encourages other councils to follow H&F lead and publish assets

The first local authority in Britain to publish a list of all its assets online has welcomed Eric Pickles’ call for other councils to follow suit.

Hammersmith & Fulham Council, the most transparent local authority in the country, published its asset register for all to see in June 2010, over a year before the communities secretary suggested that it should become common practice. The beacon council, which was also the first in Britain to publish details online on its spending, is currently selling under-used assets in order to protect front-line services as a result of the national debt crisis. It decided to publish its asset register as another way to ensure that residents could scrutinise its performance and hold it to account.

Encouraging other local authorities to show a similar level of openness, Eric Pickles said: “I want the public sector to take a good hard look at what they own. By cataloguing each and every asset, councils can help the government find innovative new ways to utilise them, improve local services, keep council running costs down and save taxpayers' money.

Council calls on TfL to find Olympia Line solution

Controversial proposals to withdraw trains from the Olympia branch of the District Line on weekdays were debated at a public meeting yesterday evening.

Around 300 residents attended the meeting at Olympia’s Pillar Hall last night (July 26) to discuss Transport for London’s (TfL) plans to scale back services on the District Line to Olympia.

TfL wants to increase capacity on the Wimbledon branch of the District line by withdrawing weekdays services on the Olympia spur – which it argues is ‘underused’.

However, residents around Olympia are worried about the loss of their local service – especially as the station is the only one in the area that provides easy step-free disabled access.

Councillor Joe Carlebach, Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council Cabinet Member for Community Care, represented the council at the meeting.

Tune in to the council

Residents can now listen to all of Hammersmith & Fulham’s full council meetings by logging onto the council’s website.

The council is recording all six full council meetings that happen each year and residents can listen and download the entire meeting to hear what happened that night.

Residents can listen to or download audio recordings of meetings since last June at www.lbhf.gov.uk/transparency.

Online info makes council more transparent

In another first for Britain’s most transparent local authority, Hammersmith & Fulham Council is now publishing Request for Information (RFIs) responses under FOI online.

H&F Council, a former LGC Council of the Year, has led the way in openness and transparency and last year became one of the first authorities to put all spending above £500 online.

And now, it is going one step further by putting RFI responses on its website, www.lbhf.gov.uk.

As a particularly high profile borough, H&F receives a huge number of requests. In 2010, 969 enquiries were answered, up from 203 in 2005.

Cllr Harry Phibbs, Cabinet Member for Community Engagement, said:

“Residents have a right to hold the council to account and ask the questions that matter on how their money is spent and how services are provided. By putting all RFIs online we are saying to our taxpayers, come and scrutinise what we are doing, warts and all. We want to make openness a real force to drive out waste and inefficiency so that we can ensure every available penny goes towards frontline service delivery.

“The information online is written in simple layman’s terms so that it is meaningful and easily understood to the general public. This is about opening ourselves up to constructive criticism, not hiding behind bureaucratic council speak. Everyone at the council will be given another reason to think twice about spending money unnecessarily. We want to be champions of openness and transparency in order to deliver value for money for our residents.”

By visiting the dedicated ‘Transparency’ page - www.lbhf.gov.uk/transparency - on the council website, taxpayers will also be able to see senior officer salaries, details of all councillors’ expenses, the borough’s asset register and departmental organisation charts.

The council’s transparency procedures have been backed by the Taxpayers Alliance that said recently:

“Hammersmith & Fulham Council has made a great step forward in this area of their own accord, publishing detailed structure charts with every single job title. A win for transparency which other councils should emulate. Hammersmith & Fulham should both be congratulated for their moves toward greater openness and transparency.”

Hammersmith & Fulham's jobs transparency

While the requirement to publish procurement spending on items over £500 is a great advance it only covers a minority of Council spending. Most of the money goes on staff. So we need to know not just how many staff a Council employs but to know what they do.

This is something that the Government is likely to introduce in due course. Hammersmith and Fulham, has already made public this information. We have produced Department organisation charts showing in detail just who does what. No doubt it can be refined but I think we are the first council to have done this.

The Taxpayers Alliance are pleased although they would like to go further and have information on each employee by job description rather than just how many work in each section. They say:

Boris Bikes should go west

Major West London attractions should all benefit from the Mayor of London’s cycle hire scheme, according to the council.

Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council is calling on the Mayor of London to extend his popular bike rental scheme westward so that sites like Westfield shopping centre, Fulham Palace, Earls Court, the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith Apollo and Chelsea, Fulham and QPR footballs clubs are all covered.

The flagship council – which is the current Council of the Year, as judged by the Local Government Chronicle – is calling on the Mayor to roll out the ‘Boris Bikes’ into the congested borough so that residents have more choice in the way they travel.

“The Mayor’s cycle hire scheme has been a big success in central London and we want to get in on the action,” says H&F Council Leader Stephen Greenhalgh. “Pedal power could relieve some of the pressure on our congested roads and jam-packed tubes and allow our major attractions to be accessed in a new way.”

Britain's most transparent council reveals detailed spending data

Britain’s most transparent council has published even more detailed information on its spending with suppliers and contractors.

Hammersmith & Fulham Council was one of the first in Britain to publish details on its spending, as Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has asked councils to do, but has now gone further than any other local authority by providing visibility of all its external contracts as well as publishing its spending with suppliers (over £500) in a user-friendly format.

H&F Council is working with the spotlightonspend website to radically improve the accessibility, relevance and value of data on its spending, revealing more detailed information than ever before on where the public’s money goes.

H&F plans to be Britain's most transparent council

Hammersmith & Fulham Council has made public its aim of becoming Britain’s most transparent local council The Council will not only make its external payments transparent to the public in accordance with Communities Secretary Eric Pickles’ express wishes, but intends to go further than any other local authority by providing visibility of its payments the voluntary sector, members’ allowances and expenses, the Council’s list of assets register, including all buildings and land owned by the Council, and most importantly, it’s total spend as reported in its finance system.

The Council’s transparency is made possible through the deployment of Spikes Cavell’s spotlightonspend - an innovative online platform, designed to radically improve the accessibility, relevance and value of Government spend and related information to the general public and open data community. Spikes Cavell has undertaken to adapt the spotlightonspend platform to facilitate access to the Council’s wider transparency agenda, which will enable access by the general public and open data community to these new classes of data.

“We don’t want to simply grudgingly comply with the Government requirements on external payments as just a box ticking exercise,” said Harry Phibbs, Cabinet Minister for Community Engagement at Hammersmith & Fulham Council. “The vast majority of spending any council undertakes is not payments to suppliers, but rather its ongoing running costs and operational investments. Information not only needs to be transparent and accessible, but also intelligible to the general public so that it is meaningful and easily understood. It’s useless to simply have raw data. It needs to be presented in a format people can follow. We saw tremendous scope to work closely with Spikes Cavell and its spotlightonspend platform to take transparency much further, and we’re very pleased to be entering this collaboration.”

Hammersmith & Fulham is already the country's most efficient council, and was named as the best council in Britain earlier this year, reducing council tax by 3% for the fourth consecutive year, while its services have been recognised by the Audit Commission as being amongst the best in the country.

The Council has also seen the largest increase in council satisfaction and value for money scores in the country. As one of the country’s leading councils, Hammersmith & Fulham is now collaborating with Spikes Cavell to extend its innovative spotlightonspend platform to push the boundaries on what transparency means.

“We want to be as open and accountable as we can on all aspects of our costs, assets and areas of spending,” said Councillor Stephen Greenhalgh, Leader of Hammersmith & Fulham Council. “We believe our collaboration with Spikes Cavell contributes to better government by ensuring we are completely open in our efficiency efforts and delivering value for money in public spending. The spotlightonspend platform is a crucial part of that process and will help ensure our data is open, accessible and intelligible for the general public.”

Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, said, "Hammersmith and Fulham are leading the way in letting the sunlight of openness into local government. They are showing that transparency not only increases democratic accountability, but also helps councils save money and cut waste. By publishing data in an open and standardised format, we can help transform our public services through levering in the innovation of the voluntary and commercial sector and the wider internet community."

Luke Spikes, CEO of Spikes Cavell & Co, which operates the spotlightonspend service, added, “With the pressure on local authorities to deliver more for less during the age of austerity, Hammersmith & Fulham Council are a great example of how the public sector can use private sector innovation and initiative to help prompt further savings both internally and externally. We’re delighted to be working with such a forward looking local authority to help push the boundaries of local government openness.

"We will be adapting the online platform along with the data management processes and supporting infrastructure in support of Hammersmith & Fulham’s ambition to become Britain’s most transparent council. In the meantime, we’re expecting to go live with Hammersmith & Fulham’s spend with third party suppliers, along with a machine readable download file of the raw data for payments in excess of £500 at the end of October with the new classes of data made accessible over the coming months.”

Spotlightonspend cuts costs, eliminates complexity and reduces risk

Spotlightonspend is a managed service that is comprised of everything necessary to cost-effectively facilitate publication of the spend and related information public bodies elect to make available to the general public.

Spotlightonspend is designed to:

• enhance the information a public body publishes to improve its accessibility, relevance and value for the intended audience – the general public and open data community.
• eliminate the complexity of becoming and staying compliant with policy,
• reduce the risk of inadvertent breach of the Data Protection Legislation ,
• cut costs by removing the need to add to the workload of a public body’s current staff or increase headcount.

 Spotlightonspend is powered by Spikes Cavell. Spikes Cavell equips decision makers in the public sector with the data, online tools and analytical insight they need in order to transform the way they procure goods and services. Since 2003, their spend analysis and spend management solutions have underpinned the efforts of more than 800 organisation’s to deliver cash savings, measure progress and manage compliance.