David Cameron has promised a ‘transparency revolution’ based upon Open Data and online publication. As part of this, since January 2011 all local authorities in England (with one exception) have begun publishing online details of all their spending over £500. What is this supposed to achieve? According to the government, many things. Publishing online will make local authorities more transparent, less wasteful and will help the public understand where its money goes. It will also give developers the opportunity to create new applications. Most of all, it will give power back to the people, enabling an army of armchair auditors to hold government to account.

What do we know? One survey of 168 local authorities found that 17 per cent felt the online publication had been ‘very successful’, 13 per cent felt it had been ‘somewhat’ successful, 17 per cent ‘good in theory but not in practice’ and 23 per cent did not know. So what of the benefits? 38 per cent felt it had increased transparency, 25 per cent accountability and 13 per cent trust. Only 3 per cent felt it increased participation or social and commercial value.

Our own study found similar variation. Some local authorities had experienced very little interest in the new data with one recording ‘180 visits and one FOI request’ in 3 months and another experiencing local media interest in ‘electricity and phone bills’ which had quickly ‘settled down’. Elsewhere there were higher levels of interest in the data, particularly from the local press and some ‘small use by trade unions’. Local media stories have highlighted odd spending on training, consultants and crematoria. Others pointed to internal benefits, with officials and politicians now able to better understand their own authority’s spending.

There has been, as of yet, little sign of the army of armchair auditors. In June Eric Pickles praised a group of bloggers who held to account the flagship Conservative authority over its contractual procedures. Other sites have sprung up with names such as ‘armchairs auditor’, and ‘reluctant armchair auditor’ but the latter wrote in the Guardian that the data was ‘not yet’ of good enough quality. There are difficulties around finding out who is accountable and knowing what mechanisms to use, whether to pass information to the media or the authority itself.

It has led to a growing number of new sites that help quickly and simply analyse the spending data, such as ‘Spotlight on Spend’ and ‘Openly Local’. The latter site is an open source site containing 168 local authorities’ spending data, attracting around a 1000 unique visitors a day, including businesses and local politicians. These sites allow you to quickly examine and compare authorities by payments, providers and make sit easy to benchmark. Many feel the future lies here.

It’s still very early days to say if it has succeeded or failed. The new online publication will make government more transparent and the parallel publication of salaries and contracts. It is unlikely to lead to very much ‘armchair auditing’ from the public, as most people won’t have the time or the patience to scroll through long excel sheets, but NGOs and journalists will find it useful. The area to watch will be the ‘local’ initiatives and hyper local sites. It is here, on their doorsteps, where the new information may make a real difference.

This article appeared in the Local Government Chronicle