It's Your Right to Know

The Audit Commission Act 1998



 Section 15 of the Act enables electors and taxpayers of a particular borough or police authority area to inspect and make their own copies of council and police authority accounts.

These rights of inspection extend beyond the authority supplying data spreadsheets, listing income and expenditure, on request.

The public has a right to see the detailed contracts, invoices, receipts, books and bills that relate to the accounts of the recent financial year.

It is a criminal offence for a council employee to obstruct anybody exercising their legal right to see these records for themselves.

The local councils and police authorities are obliged to advertise the times and locations that the accounts are open to public scrutiny. They must give 14 (working) days' notice.

Authorities are also required to provide facilities for people to copy documents and records, but may apply a 'reasonable' charge.



Until recently, the main restriction applied to details of payments to employees and former employees, such as wages and pensions.

But Parliament has now widened the exemption to allow for the identities of any persons named in the accounts to be deleted, with the agreement of the auditor, regardless of any public interest test.

This amendment is clearly designed to safeguard information relating to children in care proceedings, or vulnerable adults, and overcomes similar Human Rights Act privacy concerns.

However, it risks protecting corrupt deals whereby (for example) a councillor or council employee arranges for a relative or business associate to benefit from a contract or preferential access to services.

It also appears to include broad scope for 'redacting' identities of any officials who raise invoices, contracts and orders, or who approve invoices and other payments, or identities of company directors, consultants and individual contractors hired by local authorities.

It also appears to include details of expenses claims made by members of police authorities, which are not covered by general disclosure rules requiring records of payments to councillors to be kept in a separate public register.



The major safeguard in the statute is that councils and police authorities wishing to erase details of the accounts will need the approval of the auditor. Aggrieved taxpayers retain a general right to challenge what appears to be any unreasonable decision to redact files, through the courts.

The Act provides electors and taxpayers with a right to question the auditor about the accounts at the end of the inspection period, and to lodge formal objections to any item of expenditure.

But in a further erosion of local electors' abilities to hold local authorities to account, Parliament has now removed taxpayers' previous statutory rights to ask the auditor questions about the local authority's finances, through a representative.

It is not clear whether this new restriction prevents taxpayers from being accompanied by an agent, such as a qualified accountant, at any meeting with the auditor. But it would not exclude a solicitor or accountant from acting on formal record at any such meeting.

Electors and taxpayers must live in the locality of the local authority concerned. A court ruling in 1934, cited as legal authority in a 2004 case, held that an agent may carry out an inspection on behalf of a voter or taxpayer.

This right is not explicitly repealed in the statute, so should be enforceable under common law.

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