[wdmmg-discuss] More council (local authority) spending data

[Lisa Evans]

Rufus, I would just like to expand a little more on the wdmmg research 
team approach to getting local government financial data.

We've been looking into:

- getting a dump of a few local authorites accounts databases, just to see
   the level of detail they store. We know that there is no standard way of
   storing this data through councils, with each public body choosing their
   own preferred supplier. The best results have come from Cambridge County
   Council and Warwickshire Country Council are being co-operative too.
- looking at the reports that each public body is, by law, obliged to
   complete on their expenses, their assets and accruals. Where have good
   understanding now of the level of detail required, the auditing that
   takes place and how the results are used by central government for the
   L-pack the C-pack and the NO.
- we are looking at screen scaping local government accounts with the
   Scaper Wiki team.

Lisa

On Sat, 3 Jul 2010, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> As people may have seen, there was quite a bit of discussion yesterday
> around council spending data sparked by a post of Chris Taggart's [1]
> [2].
>
> One thing this post highlighted was that councils were starting to
> make spending data available. We've been looking for LA spending data
> for a while and have been recording what we have found in this
> spreadsheet (not much so far):
>
> http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ah8UkI7xG7eWdEpTREZpeU5TRHN4b1kyUUVZbmFNVkE
>
> Just yesterday I came across an excellent list maintained by Adrian
> Short (The government open data campaign -
> http://www.mashthestate.org.uk/) which shows councils publishing
> spending data and licence status and machine readability:
>
> <http://armchairauditor.co.uk/scoreboard>
>
> Thoughts:
>
> a) This list could be usefully merged into our existing spreadsheet
> b) We've now got some more LA spending data we can load into the data
> store <http://data.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/> -- we've already loaded
> the GLA data of course ...
>
> Rufus
>
> [1]: <http://countculture.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/the-open-spending-data-that-isn/>,
> cross-posted here:
> <http://blog.okfn.org/2010/07/02/the-open-spending-data-that-isnt/>
> [2]: <http://data.gov.uk/blog/work-local-spending-data> (disclosure:
> I'm on the public sector transparency board)
>
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