PLENTY of big public institutions don’t enjoy having outsiders prying into the way they do things. City of York Council itself has a patchy record in this respect.

Earlier this year, we revealed how the council had been criticised by the Information Commissioner’s Office for wrongly refusing to answer Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made by a local man.

An internal council audit also warned the authority was failing to meet deadlines for responding to FOI requests, and that it was not being sufficiently proactive in publishing information. The Local Government Ombudsman, meanwhile, criticised the council for the way it dealt with complaints.

Now the authority has come under fire from another source for publishing data that is ‘hard to interpret’ and ‘impossible to use’.

Spend Network, part of the Centre for Entrepreneurs’ Spend Small campaign, said York was breaching ‘very clear guidelines’ on the quality of ‘public spend’ data it produced.

The council’s data was very hard to interpret, said Spend Network’s Ian Makgill. “It’s publishing for the sake of publishing rather than publishing with the hope of... being transparent.”

So bad is the quality of the data the council has provided that it is one of only eight authorities in England to have been excluded from a national report on what local councils spend with small businesses, Spend Network says.

The council has rejected the criticism, insisting it publishes “every single payment made to our suppliers each month”.

Sometimes, however, information can be released in such a form that it is difficult to understand.

We’re not saying the authority is doing that deliberately. But local government is funded by the taxpayer (whether that be through council tax or income tax distributed via Whitehall). The city council has a clear duty, therefore, to be open and accountable about exactly how it spends our money. It must do better.