The government’s transparency revolution continues with the recent announcement of a consultation on next steps. One of its flagship policies has been the publication of all local authority spending over £500 which will allow us all to become ‘armchair auditors’ to hold our local authorities to account and hunt out waste. So how it is working?

Up until now, the effect seems to be uneven. Some authorities we have spoken to have had little interest from anyone. They think the public are simply not interested in the raw data. Others have reported an initial spike in interest from the local media which then dropped off when ‘nothing interesting’ was revealed.

Local authorities elsewhere have had much heaver use by the opposition, local journalists and, increasingly, trade unions. The regional media have highlighted odd spending, from string quartets in Kent to a particularly large hot pot in Manchester. Other officials feel the benefits are internal, as members and officials better understand their own budgets, previously a mystery to everyone except accountants. It doesn’t appear to have led to more FOI requests as some officers feared.

There are, as the government admitted in its new consultation, a number of problems. Poor data quality and inconsistency makes it difficult for the data to be used or re-used. Some authorities IT systems simply aren’t designed to put out information in the way the government want. Officials are also worried that, in tough times, the low level of the £500 threshold will feed existing prejudices that local government is ‘wasteful’. At least, some have argued, the audit regulations give plenty of context rather than isolated facts.

There has been little sign yet of the ‘army of armchair auditors’ the government hopes will comb through the data. We would expect to see lots of newspaper stories of residents or groups taking on their authorities and holding their leaders to account with this information. A few recently made a splash in Barnett. Mr Pickles himself has carried the war to the enemy, using FOI against the one council that has refused to publish its spending. There are a few websites with names such as ‘armchair auditor’ or ‘reluctant armchair auditor’, but they have not yet spread and the reluctant auditor complained in the Guardian that the data lacked the quality and context to be useful. Overall, we haven’t yet seen a groundswell of ‘active’ citizens questioning and probing their local authorities.

So will it improve? The government is determined to push on and create a new right to data, make information ‘open by default’ and encourage new innovation. They have recognised some of the difficulties and suggested that all new IT systems be designed for ease of publication, and committed to creating a new set of ‘standards’ to ensure consistency and a new right to data.

One key area to keep an eye on are the new sites, such as Openly Local, which allow information to be compared and analysed easily and quickly in all sorts of ways. The rapidly growing number of hyper local sites may also start using the data. It may be here, following the example of the local’ and ‘street-level’ experiments in the US, that some of the really interesting number crunching will happen.

This is a longer version of an article published in the Local Government Chronicle

One of the things we found out about FOI is that it never settles down. Although it becomes part and parcel of operations it always has the potential to highlight new issues or kick up a fuss-it can liberate, muck-rake or simply cause a headache. Just to show you, I wanted to look at some of the interesting developments around our town and city halls over the past few weeks.

There has been some old fashioned digging using FOI that sheds some new light on topical events and liberates all sorts of information. One activist has opened up councils investment of pension funds in the tobacco industry. Others have highlighted authorities’ lack of defence against cyber intrusion  and lack of registered managers at care homes.

There has been a nice symmetry of ‘political’ requests involving unions. The GMB trade union used FOI to find out about how many staff are choosing to opt out of pensions. The Conservatives, at the same time, have been busy calculating how much tax payers have spent ‘keeping’ Union representatives in local authorities.  We can expect to see many more of these.

It isn’t just the subjects that FOI exposes. FOI and openness can itself cause controversy and headaches for politicians. In Liverpool there was alleged manipulation of requests to a journalist. At Kirklees council the ongoing controversy around a council leader allegedly interfering in responses is now subject of an internal investigation. Birmingham council has decided to that its first debate on the riots will be held in secret to avoid ‘grandstanding’. One disgruntled councillor in Scotland linked FOI to phone hacking, expressing the concern that the lack of illegal methods of accessing information will lead to more requests. The Computer weekly has alleged that a computer company has ‘gagged’ Bristol City council and refused to allow it to publish contact details.

And finally, is this the sound of chickens coming home to roost? One of the hopes for the new publication of local government spending is that it will lead to an arm of armchair auditors (though some have their doubts). Eric Pickles publicly praised one group of local activists, despite the fact it was a flagship Tory council that was being ‘audited’ by bloggers including the wonderfully named Mrs Angry.