Council expenditure pre April 2012

As part of the Transparency Agenda, South Tyneside Council is committed to publishing its spending on goods and services over £500.

Our spending is detailed in monthly reports from April 2010.

Some items of expenditure are excluded from the reports, including:

Payments of less than £500
Banking/pension investments
Salary payments
Pension contributions
Severance payments
Settlements where confidentiality clauses exist
Information that would prejudice our commercial interests. This information has been replaced with the phrase "redacted commercial information"
Promises to pay but not yet realised
Transactions relating to the underwriting of debt
Payments relating to benefits, homelessness and fostering, for example carer benefit payments
Payments that relate to children or vulnerable people
Information that relates to personal individuals, this has been replaced by the phrase "redacted personal data"

This is not an exhaustive list. The council is expected to follow the key principles of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) and the Data Protection Act 1998 when considering spending disclosures.

Data format

The format of the reports has been published in accordance with the Local Spending Data Guidance.

The report is published in two formats:

PDF (which is easy to read)
CSV (which provides greater flexibility and allows the data to be downloaded and analysed into applications such as Microsoft Excel)

Terms used in the reports

Term	Meaning
Name of organisation	This is South Tyneside Council.
Body ID	Unique identifier for local authority area.
Service detail	The part of the council responsible for the expenditure.
Spend description	This is what the spend relates to, for example, expenditure on repairs and maintenance of a building.
Date	The date the payment was processed.
Amount	The amount that represents the total spend per transaction, excluding recoverable VAT.
Supplier name	The name of the supplier recorded on our systems.
Transaction reference	This is the unique reference number generated in our procurement system. It is this reference that needs to be quoted when making enquires.

Re-use of the data

The data provided in these reports is freely useable but must be done in accordance with our copyright and reuse license terms.

Publication of future reports

We aim to publish all expenditure reports by the 21^st working day of each month.

Contact details

If you would like to know more about our expenditure reports or the suppliers we conduct our business with then please contact us:

Email: expenditurereports@southtyneside.gov.uk

By post:

Information Governance
South Tyneside Council
Town Hall & Civic Offices
Westoe Road
South Shields
Tyne & Wear
NE33 2RL

Phone: 0191 424 6538 / 6539

We aim to respond to all requests within 20 working days where possible.

Please note that whilst we do aim to be transparent and accountable in our spending, there will be occasions where the information we hold simply can not be released because it is regarded as personal data or commercially sensitive information.