Sustainable Communities Act

My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (John Denham) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement. I am publishing a consultation paper today, 30 March, on the arrangements for the production of the second local spending report. The aim of the local spending reports is to assist local authorities, their partners and local people in promoting the sustainability of local communities by providing more information about the public funding that is spent in their area. The Act requires me to make arrangements for the production of local spending reports and to consult such persons likely to be affected by the arrangements, as I think appropriate. This consultation document places work to develop local spending reports in the broader context of our efforts to make public data public. This approach was summarised in the report to Parliament Making Local Public Expenditure Data Public and the Development of Local Spending Reports in December 2009. The document will be placed in the Library of the House and will be available on the Communities and Local Government website at www.communities.gov.uk/publications/localgovernment/consultationsecondspendrpt. We have also presented the first local spending report on the places database today at http://www.localspending.communities.gov.uk/ and are seeking views on this as part of the consultation process. This will provide intuitive, user-friendly tools to explore, compare and contrast data via interactive maps, charts and tables. These online tools will be freely and publicly available, thereby ensuring that these local spending data are available not only to local authorities and their strategic partners but also to citizens in a consistent form. Following consultation, I propose to publish the second local spending report in summer 2010.