Council release two years worth of procurement card data, just six years left to publish

Finally after eight years, Folkestone & Hythe District Council have released two years worth of their procurement card data. There is still another six years worth to add.

A Government Procurement Card is used by Government (including Local Authorities) as a payment card, not a credit card.  It is a secure and controlled method of purchasing and paying for low value goods or services, where it is used alongside other purchasing tools and processes.

These cards are more often than not held and used by senior personnel of the council, eg Chief Exec,Corporate Directors, Assistant Directors and the like. As of March 2022, it is known 24 officers of the council held a procurement card.

In 2014, the Coalition government introduced the Local Government Transparency Code 2014 which made it clear procurement card data must be published quarterly.

On the 8 April 2015 this was withdrawn and replaced with the Local Government Transparency Code 2015

Both these documents make it clear that the procurement card data is to be published quarterly, and that:

Local authorities must publish details of every transaction on a Government Procurement Card. For each transaction, the following details must be published:

date of the transaction
local authority department which incurred the expenditure
beneficiary
amount
Value Added Tax that cannot be recovered
summary of the purpose of the expenditure, and
merchant category (eg. computers, software etc).

Publishing this data has been a statutory requirement since 2014. So far the council have released just two years worth of data, there is six years more to come – that’s a statutory requirement. Let’s hope they haven’t lost or destroyed the other six years worth of data.

We thank the council team that has finally put this together and released the data.

If your an excel buff, or data buff, the information can be found here

The Shepway Vox Team

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