Tracking taxpayers' cash
Fraser Nelson 5:26pm
A long, long time ago, when it was still quite unlikely that the Conservatives would form the next government, George Osborne made a promise that, at the time, I thought he'd come to regret. He said a Tory administration would publish online every item of government expenditure over £25,000 - an idea from the Taxpayers' Alliance. Even they, I suspect, couldn't quite believe Osborne had taken such a low threshold rather than, say, £50k.
Is this really doable? Well, a CoffeeHouser recently got in touch about this fantastic site from Missouri, where Missourians can track what their tax dollars are being spent on. This kind of accountability will have a transformitive effect on public spending. Osborne will be under massive pressure by the civil service to "bring it in over five years" or something similar. I'll judge the speed by which this is rolled out as a signal of the firmness of Osborne's intent. For this is a small example of real change that we
can see under a Tory-run Treasury.
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mitch
February 7th, 2009 6:01pm Report this commentBy the time they have put in all the exemptions it will be as useless as the FOI legislation.Its great opposition stuff but no use in power.
Aless
February 7th, 2009 6:04pm Report this commentI would also like to see the introduction of the policy thrown about in "Yes Minister" whereby any local council run project costing more than £10,000 must be accompanied by a written statement of failure conditions so that the public can hold councillors to account when they waste money
Ben
February 7th, 2009 7:27pm Report this commentGood idea, but why do they have to wait for a General Election? They could show their intent by doing this in Tory-controlled councils.
Harry O
February 7th, 2009 7:58pm Report this commentI like this idea. It should be applied to local government expenditure as will.
Mark
February 7th, 2009 8:17pm Report this commentI think this promise was repeated very recently.
The only question is: what will it cost to impelement?
Morus
February 7th, 2009 8:31pm Report this commentI am working in this space at the moment, as my job is to deploy precisely this management information. In my estimations, a reasonable working model such as this could be implemented for all Central Government within about 3-4 months, at a cost of no more than £5m per annum, with categorisation of spend down to a £25k threshold and lower, and indicating which cost centre and which budget-holder signed it off. The spend could be broken down, not only by category (a three tiered taxonomy to begin with), but also by supplier.
The £5m might seem a lot, but compared to the £136 spent on the BBC website each year, or the £7.5m per annum that the Department for Transport spends on websites.
The £5m would also be easily rcovered by lessening the burden of FoI requests that currently require manual gathering of data.
It is my greatest hope that the Conservatives implement this solution (I have no commercial interest by the way - I'd volunteer to run such a project), and that they use their first term to completely overhaul Governmental Procurement. There are billions to save, if you know what you're doing and are prepared to exercise a mandate from the Treasury.
Anan
February 7th, 2009 8:55pm Report this commentYes very good. They should do it in Tory Councils but obviously with an even lower threshold, say £5,000.
TrevorsDen
February 7th, 2009 9:00pm Report this comment"They could show their intent by doing this in Tory-controlled councils."
Yes it could but who would pay for it?
Will labour provide the funds.
It could come from the council tax but then thy would be faced with attacks of
'cuts'.
The issue here is a wider one and is important. It is transparency. Self imposed limits.
The inevitable shambles of an economic outlook the Conservatives will face (the debt burden for one) really out to encourage this as a policy.
Ken
February 7th, 2009 10:14pm Report this commentMark, simple. Email Jay Nixon governor of Miss.
The Miss. portal is a great idea and shows exactly how the Internet can excel.
John Page
February 7th, 2009 10:24pm Report this commentYes it recently came up - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/26/whitehall-spending-george-osborne - Obama's also going down this road.
Much of his proposal seemed incoherent, though: http://tinyurl.com/a9lwzq and http://tinyurl.com/cerrco .
There's a US site http://usaspending.gov/ and there was a useful FT piece back in 2007 about this "accountable transparency" - http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto080820071539238181&page=1
Craig R
February 7th, 2009 10:46pm Report this commentI'd love to see this happen, but knowing the British Civil Service I have to say, I'll believe it when I see it... Repeat after me: "That's a very brave decision, Minister..."
Nick Kaplan
February 7th, 2009 10:54pm Report this commentMark; I guess the good thing about this policy is that you will be able to find out the answer to that question for yourself.
Archie
February 8th, 2009 8:08am Report this commentMorus for Chancellor!
Bishop Hill
February 8th, 2009 10:04am Report this commentMorus
Why can't we just stick a report-writer on each box so that the general public can interrogate the systems (or maybe a data warehouse) directly? Then ALL the data is accessible.
Does one actually need a central resource?
Hawkeye
February 8th, 2009 11:12am Report this commentThis sort of thing would be very, very easy to implement. Every council / public body / government dept HAS to keep accounts and those accounts are already computerised and produce management summaries.
The new govt merely has to define an export format for the relevant data and require it to be sent to a secure automated server via an automated call each month as the previous month's accounting is rolled up. It could then be automatically displayed via a website - either secured by password or freely available.
All the technologies are there - XML, SOAP, a choice of databases and web server technologies. It all exists and it does not have to be expensive.
THX1138
February 8th, 2009 4:30pm Report this commentGreat idea the fist think to go on it could be the cost of the IT consultants to build it. No doubt that would be P&C between the contractor & the Government, this will never work unless the Tories are prepared to tear up the P&C clauses in all the existing IT & PFI contracts. I don't think Boy George has really thought this through
Take axe to the £100 billion in IT projects (the quoted costs so the actual costs will probably be double that) in the pipeline at present, this is the real scandal of Government spending.
Morus
February 8th, 2009 6:31pm Report this commentBishop Hill - that's essentially what we're talking about, but there are peripheral benefits to seeing things centrally, rather than by system (so by instance, by platform).
A centralised taxonomy, and a centralised data warehouse (for that is what it essentially is) would allow us to pick up synergies of cross-departmental spend with the same supplier family. Use volume guarantees, and you can leverage significant savings.
It's this pan governmental view that I would be excited by, but of course, it could equally be done by departments independently - I kjsut wonder if an implementation programme would be easier to run centrally.
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