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   Treasury to release breakdown of Government spending 'to remove cloak of secrecy'
A detailed breakdown of Government spending over the past two years will be released by the Treasury for the first time today as part of a Government openness drive. The Combined On-line Information System - known as Coins - is one of a raft of databases David Cameron has demanded be released by Whitehall departments. It contains millions of individual lines of public sector expenditure, and its release had previously been blocked from publication despite frequent requests. Officials tried to play down initial public expectations of the release, pointing out that the raw data would be meaningless to most voters. Instead, they hope institutions and experts will use their technical expertise to eventually turn it into a more-easily accessible format. Chancellor George Osborne complained last year that Gordon Brown had intervened to deny his call for the figures to be published to help him formulate opposition policy. The claim was strongly denied by Labour, which said the decision was taken by the civil service, but Mr Osborne promised to release the data if he took over at the Treasury. Earlier this week, the names, pay and perks of the 172 senior civil servants earning more than £150,000 were published were released in the first part of the disclosure programme. It was also announced that people will be able to check the weekly MRSA and Clostridium difficile (C diff) rates at their local hospital. Government contracts over £10,000 will be published on a single website from September with items of central government spending over £25,000 and local government over £500 shortly afterwards. The Prime Minister said he wanted to remove the "cloak of secrecy" from official information in a bid to restore public trust in politics and allow them to be used by experts. Academic studies have suggested allowing outside experts to build web applications and sites around government data could contribute up to £6 billion to the economy. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is overseeing the process - and the creation of a public "right to data" - as the head of a Public Sector Transparency Board. It also includes World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and mysociety website founder Tom Steinberg among outside experts. Source: 24dash Photo: HM Treasury Due to problems with spam only SalfordOnline members can now leave comments. Becoming a member of SalfordOnline only takes a minute, just hit the red Join Us button at the top right hand side of the page to create your Personal account. Got a news story? Need help with publicity for an event in Salford? Send it to newsdesk@salfordonline.com or call the SalfordOnline newsdesk on 0161 789 5377. |
