The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) published a revised Local Government Transparency Code on 27 February 2015 which includes new requirements to publish social housing assets. The revised Code came into effect on 1 April 2015.
The Local Government Transparency Code 2015 is published, alongside a frequently-asked questions document for social housing. For all other parts of the code a frequently-asked questions document is available alongside the old part of the code. The Local Government (Transparency Requirements) (England) Regulations 2015 regulates the Code.
The Code requires local authorities in England to publish information related to the following themes:
- expenditure over £500
- government procurement card transactions
- procurement information
- grants to voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations
- organisation chart
- senior salaries
- the pay multiple
- trade union facility time
- local land assets
- social housing asset value
- parking accounts and parking spaces
- fraud
- the constitution.
Guidance documents
The LGA has produced a set of revised practical guidance documents to support local authorities in understanding and implementing the Transparency Code 2015 and to help them publish the data in a meaningful and consistent way.
The guidance has been divided into four themes:
(updated June 2015)
(updated 8 June 2015)
(updated 16 September 2015)
(updated 16 September 2015)
(updated 30 November 2015)
(updated 30 November 2015)
(updated 8 June 2015)
(updated 8 June 2015)
Open data schemas
The LGA, together with LeGSB, local authorities and Porism, and with input from data users, also developed templates and schemas for most of the datasets. The templates are a guide what to include in the publication which can be found in the annexes of each of the guidance documents. The schemas are tabular formats for publishing the data in spreadsheets. These schemas can be used on a voluntary basis as a standard against which local authorities can publish data – enabling easy access, reuse and comparison between different areas. The schemas are available here: Open data schemas.
Data publishing and data standards learning modules for Local Government
For further information, please email: [email protected]