All ten Greater Manchester councils have now published details of payments to suppliers over £500 - totalling more than £300 million of taxpayers money - to comply with new government rules on openness and transparency in local government.
Four Greater Manchester councils left it until the last minute to comply with the rules. Salford, Tameside, Stockport and Bury councils yesterday all published itemised lists of all payments over £500.
The MEN has now gone through details published by all ten councils - and you can see the links to each of them here:
How Manchester council spent £60m last month
How Trafford council spent £50m in six months
Oldham council's £100,000 frozen food bill
Rochdale council paid £65,000 to marketing firm
Bolton council spent more than £850 on beer for one of its bars – in just one month
Wigan council paid agency £16,000 to design its website
How Salford council spent £30m in one month
How Tameside council spent over £27m in one month
How Stockport council paid £400k to anonymous recipients
How Bury council spent £26,000 on security in one month
Among the expenditure revealed by the last four councils was:
- £1,600 paid by Salford council to a troupe of mostly-disabled comedians.
- Bury spent £1,000 on cakes and flapjacks
- Stockport paid more than £400,000 to anonymous recipients, whose details were removed for confidentiality reasons.
- Tameside revealed £27m worth of spending.
Among the biggest payments were £660,000 paid to a law firm by Bury council, £1.6m by Stockport to its own cleaning and school meals company SK Solutions, and £1.7m paid by Tameside to contractors as part of its school-building programme.
All four councils published the lists on their websites, including the exact payment amount, department and nature of the item.
Salford, Tameside and Stockport only released details of one month – December 2010 – while Bury listed nine months’ worth.
The rest of Greater Manchester’s councils published their spending last week.
It comes as they face hundreds of millions of pounds in cutbacks – but a spokesman for the Local Government Association denied that the publication of expenditure placed an unnecessary burden on stretched councils.
He said: "We recognise the need in this tough economic climate for councils to demonstrate the value of what they are doing and explain to residents how their money is being spent."
As of last night 337 of the 353 councils ordered to reveal their expenses had either published their information or committed to do so.
Last week the M.E.N. revealed the spending of six councils in our region – Manchester, Bolton, Trafford, Oldham, Rochdale, and Wigan.
We revealed how:
- Manchester council spent £20,000 hiring conference space at Eastlands and £750 on a huge chicken hotpot in a single month
- Bolton ran up an £850 beer bill and £3,000 on refreshments for council meetings
- Oldham spent more than £4,000 on ground coffee and £500 on a string quartet
- Rochdale shelled out £65,000 on a ‘rebranding’ exercise.
The information released shows how councils spend millions of pounds a year on food and drinks – the majority of which ends up in Greater Manchester’s school.
They also include multi-million pound contracts for building projects.
Manchester’s spending details cover £60m worth of payments from December 2010.
The largest was £2.6m, by the chief executive’s department, for ‘reference materials’. Zaylai Books was paid £1.8m for adult fiction books, while more than £3m was made in foster-parent payments.
Some of the other councils published spending data going back several years.
Trafford council revealed a £50m itemised bill covering six months, while Wigan published £65m of payments over nine months.
Bolton has only revealed last October’s spending online, but plans to make November and December available to inspect at its town hall. Oldham has made available the last three months of spending, totalling £65m.
Rochdale has revealed nine months and £21m of records
The remaining four councils in Greater Manchester – Stockport, Salford, Tameside and Bury – will publish their figures on Monday.
The new rules have been brought in as town halls across the region face swingeing cuts in their government grants. Manchester alone is facing a £110m black hole in its budget and is set to axe 2,000 jobs.
Councils defended their spending, saying cash was spent on essential services and great effort was made to ensure the best deals were struck.
A spokesman for Manchester town hall said it would cost £60,000 to collect and publish the details, which must include the name of the department, the date of payment and the company paid - plus the exact sum.
He said thousands of people were employed as a result of the council’s spending, the vast majority of which went to local firms.
“We are a big organisation and our figures are comparable to the spending of other similarly large local authorities,” he added.
Eric Pickles, the local government secretary, said the new rules would create greater transparency, allowing residents to check if they were getting value for money.
David Sparks, from the Local Government Association, said: “Local government is the most directly accountable part of the public sector and councils work hard to stay in close touch with residents to ensure they provide the best, most efficient services possible.”
How Manchester council spent £60m last month
How Trafford council spent £50m in six months
Oldham council's £100,000 frozen food bill
Rochdale council paid £65,000 to marketing firm
Bolton council spent more than £850 on beer for one of its bars – in just one month
Wigan council paid agency £16,000 to design its website
How Salford council spent £30m in one month
How Tameside council spent over £27m in one month
How Stockport council paid £400k to anonymous recipients
How Bury council spent £26,000 on security in one month
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Tameside always the last to divulge anything and sometimes even wishes too make No Comment.
It would win the Greater Manchester League Table for avoiding tackles in the political game.
With 220,000 public the name of the game is defend from having the whole Council on the goal line.
We need someone who can bend it like they do,what`s your price Beckham??
YOU ONLY PUBLISHED THE THE ESSENTIAL ITEMS OR FRONT LINE ITEMS, WHAT ABOUT THE OBSCURE HIDDEN AMOUNTS.
£20,000 for confrence space in a building they own????
i blame the coalition!!!
It is right that public service officials should publish what they spend taxpayers money on. They are supposed to be spending the people's money on behalf of the people and they do get carried away sometimes so need to be reined in!
But don't get blown away by the BIG numbers. The one liner entries with clever titles and values of tens of millions of pounds can often hide very interesting costs and they need to be explained in detail and properly justified.
How much - IN DETAIL - was spent by the Councils and by GMITA on consultants? Who are they paying and how much and EXACTLY what are the people of Manchester getting in return?
Why are the jobs of consultants who are paid hundreds of pounds a day not being filled by local people who would cost a fraction of the price and do as good a job. Okay, some specialist people are hard to find, but surely not all the tens of thousands of consultant days paid for by our representatives using local peoples money are for skills impossible to find in Manchester.
Boring! How dare the councils spend any money at all. It's a disgrace. Spending money on young people and community events! Shocking.
Lets all get on our high horses and dissect every last penny spent and demand even more bureaucracy, further increasing the spending on producing these mostly meaningless report.
Yes, as council tax payers we want value for money, but we don't need to know every little thing the council pays. They're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. Who'd be a councillor?
Manchester Council among many others with big government grants are fat, dumb and happy.
MCC receive about 4 times the amount of money per head in their Formula Grant than do more cost-effective authorities in Cheshire and the South-East. Fir example my Council gets £220 per person whereas Manchester gets £739. This subsidy is funded by more efficient council having their business rates taken away by central government and allocated to Councils such as MCC. We lose 80% of our business rates in this way and we made up the difference by paying more Council Tax which went up over 120% in just 10 years. If we had not had more of our biz rates confiscated in this way our Council Tax would have gone up by 5%.
I am fed up with propping up MCC when I do not even live there.
Never before have I grumbled about this superb website but....You say that you reveal how "six councils " have spent money but you give only four. And you omit the last of the big spenders, the Soviet Republic of Bolton. Come, come, now. Do tell us how much was spent on the famous Global Warming Conference in Bolton last year. And tell us how much has been spent by the policy of not filling in pot-holes, not gritting streets and its aleatory policy of dustbin emptying.
(Ed's note - Apologies, the link to the Bolton council details is now on the story - Wigan to follow)
As I have always said, Socialist/Liberal councils are by light years the biggest, most inefficient, most wasteful, incompetent buffons the UK have ever seen.
Like kids in a sweetshop, they throw around YOUR money like it's confetti. And still the people of Manchester and surrounding areas vote for these imbeciles safe in the knowledge these fools are pouring YOUR money straight down the nearest drain.
Imagine if we had these fools in government!??.....oh! sorry we did for 13 years!!!!....exactly why the country is on its knees!
and finally some of the good from the co-alition starts to filter through.
transparency in our councils was needed and we have the tories to thank for this.
i have been building up a figure of wastage that the liberal oldham council has run up over the last 2 years in office and that figure now stands at £4,395,000. and thats from just news stories alone. if i looked further into this i bet it would be an even bigger figure!
and yet those at the top remain in their nice cushy jobs when it is clear they're not fit for purpose. all the while others lower down the ladder are loosing their jobs.
So its now Monday and still I find no info re Tameside Councils share of the £250 million spent.
Come on MEN why let them off the3 hook,get on the phone and find out.
Getting anything out of TMBC equals pulling teeth lets have the info please.
Where are bury mistakes, I mean figures. Come on do tell all how you wasted our council tax.
(Ed's note - Bury's figures, as well as those from Salford, Stockport and Tameside, have finally been supplied to us. They'll be here to view shortly)
and strangely enough i tried putting a similar comment on the oldham evening chronicle comments page and they've censored it.
looks like the council have at least the local newspaper in its pocket!
A Council wasting money-hold the front page what a shocker! Just want to make it clear I was not one of the anonymous recipients!
If Councillors are spending £millions of OUR MONEY,why should we trust those who have no financial backgrounds,little education in many instances,are incapable of formulating written replies unless a Council worker checks the terminology used and originate from low skilled occupations.
Whether they be Union Spokespersons,Window Cleaners,Market Traders,Railway Porters,Bus Drivers,Council Employees at low levels,or Nursery Assistants,its obvious that such backgrounds do not merit dealing with multi million projects,hence the cut backs required,but they remain whilst the WORKERS cop the cuts.
You might as well have a Railway Porter doing Surgery on your body,or a Market Trader
pulling your leg(sorry that should read teeth.)
Never in the annals of history have so many unqualified people been placed in positions of power where they chuck YOUR MONEY about mainly to get the support of Labour Voters who appear to wallow in the s---- created by Labour Councils.
You picked em,so reap their lousy decisions.
The councils have been exposed. This should have happened years ago. Well done Cameron and team, transparency is a lovely word.
No wonder there are cuts right across the board, and here we all are like rabbits in a headlight wondering where all of the money goes?
Well for starters before Councillors get on their high horses about cuts which are funded by our taxes, can they explain why Manchester City Council have to employ a 'City council's secondary schools adviser on tolerance'?.
What kind of non-job is this, and if these are the kind of positions that are to be lost due to the funding deficit then I'm all for it.
When will the council realise that they are not their to socially engineer the latest pet project of the day but to empty the bins and keep the roads clean.
Idiots the lot of you, and hopefully your empire building days are over.