Just as important to us as transparent senior officer pay and spending over £500 is trying to better explain to our customers where we spend our budget. In line with this we produced a Council Spending Map which presents the Council's spending in a simpler format:
How did Northamptonshire County Council go about becoming a more transparent local authority?
At the turn of 2010 we embarked on a journey to give public access to senior salaries and spending over £500. Our spending over £500 is published in an open and standardised format:
These publications represent the end of a long process to revolutionise not only our approach to transparency, but also our internal processes so they could meet this commitment:
- In January 2010 we published the salary and expenses of our then Chief Executive and committed to publishing details of council expenditure.
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- In February 2010 our Deputy Chief Finance Officer and Head of Procurement wrote to our suppliers notifying them of our intention to begin publishing our spend.
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- In March 2010 our Corporate Management Team (CMT) proposed their salaries and expenses would be published alongside our Chief Executive's, and that we would publish all spend over £500. This programme of publication was then presented to Councillor Jim Harker, Leader of Northamptonshire County Council, who signed it off with his full support.
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- In April 2010 we agreed that the job titles and salaries of all senior managers who report directly to them, our Heads of Service, would be published.
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- In late May 2010 we published the salaries and expenses of our CMT and the job titles and salaries of our Heads of Service. We began the process of publishing spending over £500 on 1st June 2010.
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We decided that for an organisation of our size with a budget spend of over £1 billion, we should begin publishing our spend over £500 directorate by directorate so that we didn’t bombard our customers with data.
We began on 1st June 2010 with Health and Adult Social Services, and expanded month by month to include:
- Environment, Growth and Commissioning
- Customer and Community Services
- Chief Executive’s directorate
- Finance and Commercial services
We completed this process on 27th August 2010 with the publication of Children and Young People’s Service's spend over £500.