Update on local spending, HMRC Aspire contract and more COINS.

Here are three updates on requests about public spending, made recently:

1. I’ve been asking for more detail on the way local council accounts are held at Cambridge City Council, Warwickshire County Council, East Cambridgeshire District Council and Huntingdonshire District Council. I picked Cambridgeshire based councils because I live there, and Warwickshire County Council because they have a new open data website. You may also remember that I asked for Cambridgeshire County Council’s accounts database schema, well I’ve now asked for the data with a few examples of reasonable redactions. I’ve been updating.  I’ve started a spreadsheet with all the requests I’ve made of local councils and the types of request. I hope that other people will contribute to this spreadsheet with details and requests for their local authority.
2. Francis Irving had his request for a copy of the Aspire contract rejected. The Aspire contract is the agreement that HM Revenue and Customs made to outsource most, maybe all, of its IT services to Capgemini. Francis was told to be more specific in his request. Included with the rejection letter was some further reading on the Aspire contract. I’ve been working my way through this and trying to make some specific, and hopefully useful, requests for information. I’ve asked for more details about how Capgemini’s performance is being measured. Let’s see how that goes.
3. There have been some more requests for bits of the COINS database from Julian Todd who is now appealing his request for 23 complete COINS records and from Francis Irving who has read the COINS training materials (PDF) and consequently asks for the COINS fact table.

To end I’ll just add this Wordle that I made by pasting into Wordle.com all the text in the COINS training materials I received:

It says it all really: “redacted data” and “Screen-shot exempt”.