Wednesday, February 2, 2011

SNTC publishes payments and now it doesn't

Having tried to give a thumbs up for the Town Council publishing payment in a previous blog, I'm at a bit of a loss to see this hasn't been repeated. Indeed the minutes of Finance and General Purposes Committee 25/11/10 are no longer on the website! Why?

I know the payments were at the bottom of the minutes because I commented on them. What is so secret that they need to be hidden? This is again the Town Council doing something and then stopping it, probably because this is too much information. I will point out that payments are public document that Town Councillors need to approve.

The Coalition want Councils to publish payments over £500. Wouldn't it be easier to publish all payments rather than have to go through the whole process of fishing out the over £500 payments.

I give the Town Council a bit of praise for publishing payments and they take the facility away.

Update.......
It has been pointed out to me that the minutes of the 27/1/11 are in fact the minutes of 25/11/10. This is an error on my part as I should have read what I was looking at. This doesn't detract from the thrust of what I'm saying. The minutes of 25/11/10 have been altered. The payments schedules included in the original publication of the minutes have been taken away. Again, I give the Town Council a bit of praise in being transparent and they take that transparency away. 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I think the problem is more a webmaster's mistake than council deliberately hiding it. If you look at the URL for the Jan '11 minutes it still points to http://www.stneots-tc.gov.uk/download/minutes-finance-gen/F&GP_mins_25.11.10.pdf

Dave said...

Fine but the Town Council took the list of payments section off the end of the minutes which was published in an earlier version. Bad Town Council.