Ticon UK Ltd

The announcement that Councils will be required to publish all transactions over £500 has been widely trailed by Eric Pickles and the Coalition Government, but what does this mean for Councils?

Aside from the challenge of publishing data that does not contain individual's names or money placed nightly on the markets, what can Councils expect once they actually publish the data? We suspect that this data will create more heat than light. Users analysing the data will be presented with a long list of supplier names, dates and values. The problem is that this data really only has value when you know what the named supplier provides, if their name doesn't give you a clue then you're going to have to find out what each supplier does before you can estimate what was bought from the supplier. Without this context it is difficult to make sense of the data.

This is bad news for large multinationals like Cap Gemini, Randstadt and British Gas, but not such bad news for suppliers with less famous names. There is a small opportunity available to people who want to make comparative estimates of spend based on common denominators; for example you could try to identify the spend per resident on temp staff between to London Boroughs. However this only works if you know that you've been certain to gather all of the spend on gas in both Boroughs, something that is very difficult to do using basic ledger data.

Those that have most to gain are those of us who provide services to the public sector, we will be looking closely to see what our competitors are up to, who they work with, how much they charge and whether they are able to maintain their relationships with their customers. I hope our competitors will be looking closely at us too. 

Meanwhile shed a tear for all those multinationals that are going to have to explain why their charges differ so much between authorities.