Council Expenditure over £500
Why do we publish this information?
In 2010 the Communities and Local Government Secretary called on councils to provide financial transparency by publishing online information about spending over £500. This has now been updated to include all spend made using a Government Procurement card.
How is the information presented?
The reports are available as PDF files for easy reading and printing and also as CSV files to allow reuse and analysis. The CSV version includes more information than the PDF, namely details of the internal cost centre and account code that the expenditure has been coded to in addition to the SeRCOP classifications used on the PDF file.
Local authorities have different structures for services or departments and different lines of responsibility, making comparisons between them difficult.
To help make comparisons the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants (CIPFA) uses a Service Reporting Code of Practice for local authorities (SeRCOP) that provides standard categories for both services (departments) and expense types.
Important Note about the CSV files:
We have saved the spreadsheets as CSV files so that they can be easily read in a variety of applications. However the CSV format uses a standard column width and not all entries may be completely visible. To view all the data, you will need to expand the columns. You can do this by selecting all the cells in the file (the grey box beside column A and above row 1), and then clicking on Format / Column / AutoFitSelection.