Did you know that you have the right under law to examine the accounts of your local council and ask questions about them and even challenge items? This guide (pdf) from the National Audit Office explains how. There are two major considerations, however. Firstly, the accounts are open for an inspection period of only 30 days. The dates are set by the local authority itself but are usually in the early summer.
Secondly, and the reason for this particular post, the accounts are set out in a format which is intelligible only to an expert in the specialised field of public accountancy. In my four years on the council and even with the friendly guidance of Derek Davies and his successors in the county borough's finance directorate I never got to grips with all the jargon. Every year it seems the standards body which regulates public authority finance makes statements of accounts more complicated, when surely for the sake of good governance they should be more intelligible to not only the general public but also councillors who are unlikely to be trained accountants.
This obfuscation is also true of those UK central government accounts which are available to the general public, as Martin Wheatley points out in an Institute for Government opinion piece. There are Single Departmental Plans which, it seems, are unavailable even to MPs. Mr Wheatley calls for transparency on the Canadian model, illustrating his point with infographics starting from https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/ems-sgd/edb-bdd/index-eng.html#start. It is very impressive, even in the short time I have had to dip into it.
Such informative graphics may be beyond the budget of even unitary authorities, but not that of central government. At the minimum, a text format of a readily-understandable set of accounts is capable of being produced by either, and is long overdue.
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