Tories reveal details of Labour spending - from thrill rides to jazz quartets

[Hopeless Romantic]

Indian head massages, visits to nature reserves and trips up the Blackpool Tower were among the multimillion pound expenses laid bare today in the first tranche of documents published online as part of the government's public spending disclosure drive.

In the release of the Department of Communities and Local Government expenditure, the Tories made good a pre-election promise to open up government data and revealed details of the 1,900 items costing a total of £314m, a bill notched up during the last 12 months of the previous administration. Separately there was a similarly sized £337m pot for the department's quangos.

Vivid examples were immediately deployed to illustrate the new government's central charge that Labour oversaw a "culture of excess".

Among the expenses revealed was £1,673 to a company called Stress Angels, which offers massages, acupressure, Indian head massage and reflexology.

Significant amounts were spent on improving the mental faculties of employees – £3,450 went on a session with Improwise, whose techniques include using a live jazz quartet to demonstrate different skills, and £1,000 to Illumine, a company which helps workers improve their practical skills.

Then there was £626 on a trip to a nature reserve in Nottingham and £539 on an awayday to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Accommodation at a hotel – the Rubens, opposite Buckingham Palace – cost £17,000. Another £3,670 went to Halfords cycle shop.

The figures reveal that last year the department also ran up bills of more than £100,000 on market research and polling with a total of £16m on marketing, advertising, promotion and events; £310,000 went on food, £635,000 on taxis and car use; while £543 was paid to a limousine company in the north-east of England.

Local government minister Bob Neill took his cue: "It seems quite literally the Government Offices for the Regions were taking the taxpayer for a ride. They were living it up at the taxpayers' expense whilst thousands of households were struggling to make ends meet. Splashing out six-figure sums on pollsters appears to be another one of Labour's vanity projects. It's unforgivable that a culture of excess was allowed to flourish for so long."

The Tories pledged an era of open government when they first gave political philosophy to the theory of the "post-bureaucratic age" – this being the idea that the internet was enabling every user to process and analyse information and so take action for themselves. But this week some might argue communities secretary Eric Pickles has gone in for some "disclosure vigilantism" with overtones of political expediency rather than political philosophy.

The Tories in opposition had pledged they would only publish online expenditure of more than £25,000, not the £500 threshold Pickles had chosen. The official reason is that councils will have a £500 threshold and since his department is in charge of councils he should apply the same rule when it comes in the autumn.

Had the threshold remained at the £25,000 that a team led by Oliver Letwin chose before government it would not have revealed the massages, trips to the seaside or the jazz lessons. Observers will now wait to see whether he will stick to his new low water mark next year when publishing his first year's figures or whether he will revert to the amount agreed when in opposition.

Likewise, the disclosed information does not show how many civil servants attended the Blackpool away day.

The idea behind publishing the expenses online is to encourage members of the public to scour through the books of government departments – and to let civil servants know their every expense chit and office morale boosting whim is going to be scrutinised by "armchair auditors".

So today Pickles appealed for domestic number crunchers to come forward. "The simple task of putting spending online will open the doors to an army of armchair auditors who will be able to see at a glance exactly where millions of pounds spent last year went," he said.

"The data is already showing how we need to do things differently. That means spending more carefully, getting better deals and asking ourselves at every turn whether every purchase is needed and whether it provides value for the taxpayers' pound. Looking at last year's spending it is clear that there is room for improvement."

One former Labour minister, Tom Watson – a passionate believer in liberating information from the department's computer hard drives – praised the move by Pickles. He said: "Transparent budgeting is radical and has the potential to transform public sector accountability.

"Eric Pickles now leads the government as the minister most committed to transparency. I call on every other department and quango to follow his brave lead and publish all items of expenditure over £500. And once new systems are in place, the figures should be published quarterly."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/12/government-labour-spending-releases-records

[non sociopath skin]

1. I'd like to see some context here.

"£3,450 went on a session with Improwise, whose techniques include using a live jazz quartet" which means that the employees all got jazz lessons ... sounds like Daily Wail logic to me.

I have no trouble with open auditing, however. Next up, the banks we bailed out ....?

The Skin