Latest Council Spending Data On Armchair Auditor

The latest batch of council spending data – Quarter 3 of 2011 – has been added to Armchair Auditor (Thanks WightGeek!).

The Armchair Auditor system now holds 59,944 payments totalling £266.2 million over seven quarters to 2,440 suppliers.

Have a look around
If you’ve never used it, we strong recommend you do and we suspect, you’ll find it fascinating to click around.

By way of a random selection of the kind of thing you can find, we’ve put together a few bits below for you. There should probably be at least one thing there to interest you.

Loan Interest of nearly eight million pounds (£7,751,338.59) in less than two years.
£153,232.07 on a service area called ‘Identity Management‘
The ‘Public Realm Contract Gaps‘ appear to have got considerably larger of late. In the last quarter, they cost us £45,827.11 in just three months, considerably up from the £21,849.16 in the previous quarter.
It’s not all about finding big increases in spending, you can compare how much billing different contractors do over different years, for example the Street Cleansing Contract which changed from Island Waste Services from to Spanish-owned Ubaser.
Questions can’t help but be raised when you see £28,562.97 being paid in three months with photocopier company Ricoh, going mostly on Photocopying Costs and hire of equipment.
Or Litigation Costs are over £200,000 in less than two years, making up the bulk of the £372,205.41 classified as Legal Fees Other P.
Or School Reorganisation Consultation Costs has £266,499 against it over the same period.
Or £1,148,510 spent on Pension Fund Scheme Administration in just one year.
Quite what ‘Legal Fees Other P’ we as rate payers have received from DLA Piper UK LLP for the £11,959.20 they’ve been paid over the ‘Concessionary Fares Over 60s’. Sure, it pales into insignificance when compared against the £419,603 we’ve paid them in less than two years, but it’d still be good to know.
It’s not just the latest payment details that are there – you’ll see that Psychic Frontiers Ltd were paid £2,413.67 ~~over the period although sadly the details of what they did aren’t disclosed beyond it was for ‘Outside Promotions’~~. Darren tells us that they performed at Media Theatre and that the money is made up of “ticket income they made on the evening minus the hire costs of the theatre and other expenditure”.