Hammersmith and Fulham Council to make all its funding to voluntary sector public

News

Hammersmith and Fulham Council to make all its funding to voluntary sector public 1

Finance | Vibeka Mair | 5 Oct 2010

Hammersmith and Fulham Council plans to make public all its payments to the voluntary sector in what it calls a bid to become ‘Britain’s most transparent council’.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles is already trying to spearhead a culture of transparency in local councils by asking them to make their external payments clear to the public.

But Hammersmith and Fulham says it intends to go further than any other local authority by providing visibility of its payments to the voluntary sector, members’ allowances and expenses, the register of buildings and land owned by the council and total spend as recorded in its finance system.

IT company Spikes Cavell has undertaken to adapt the spotlightonspend platform to facilitate the access by the general public and open data community to these new data pools.

Harry Phibbs, cabinet minister for community engagement at Hammersmith and Fulham Council said: “We don’t want to simply grudgingly comply with the government requirements on external payments as just a box-ticking exercise.

“We saw tremendous scope to work closely with Spikes Cavell and its spotlightonspend platform to take transparency much further.

“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."

Place a comment

Theunis Viljoen
CEO
BIOLAP Limited
5 Oct 2010

BIOLAP has actually been able to load and publish details of more than 60 Councils' payments to suppliers into its free Council Expenses Dashboard at - http://www.biolap.co.uk/index.php/councilexpenses.html

Users can slice and dice, compare and sort the spend as well as drill through to underlying transactions.

[Reply]

Comments

[Cancel] | Reply to:

Name *

Email *

Organisation

Job Title

Comments *

Verification *

* Please read our Community Standards

Close »

Community Standards

The civilsociety.co.uk community and comments board is intended as a platform for informed and civilised debate.

We hope to encourage a broad range of views, however, there are standards that we expect commentators to uphold. We reserve the right to delete or amend any comments that do not adhere to these standards.

We welcome:

Robust but respectful debate
Strongly held opinions
Intelligent relevant discussion
The sharing of relevant experiences
New participants

We will not publish:

Rude, threatening, offensive, obscene or abusive language, or links to such material
Links to commercial organisations or spam postings. The comments board is not an advertising platform
The posting of contact details for yourself or others
Comments intended for malicious purpose or mindless abuse
Comments purporting to be from another person or organisation under false pretences
Gratuitous criticism, commentary or self-promotion
Any material which breaches copyright or privacy laws, or could be considered libellous
The use of the comments board for the pursuit or extension of personal disputes

Be aware:

Views expressed on the comments board are left at users’ discretion and are in no way views held or supported by Civil Society Media
Comments left by others may not be accurate, do not rely on them as fact
You may be misunderstood - sarcasm and humour can easily be taken out of context, try to be clear

Please:

Enjoy the opportunity to express your opinion and respect the right of others to express theirs
Confine your remarks to issues rather than personalities

Together we can keep our community a polite, respectful and intelligent platform for discussion.