As part of our commitment to providing financial transparency, any spend on goods and services made with a Council Procurement Card are now listed online.
Procurement Cards are used by the Council as a payment card, not a credit card, and they are the preferred method of purchasing and paying for low value goods or services. It provides a cost-effective method of payment with benefits in terms of convenience, reduced administration and reduced procurement processing times.
The objective in using a Procurement Card is to reduce the administration involved in requisitioning, ordering and the processing of invoices. Using a Procurement Card to conduct the routine purchasing business of the authority can significantly reduce the number of orders and invoices processed and facilitate payments to suppliers, in turn saving the authority money and reducing the burden on the Public Purse.
Procurement Card payments are transferred into a suppliers account within one working day benefiting the supplier, in particular Small and Medium Enterprises (SME's).
Any FOI requests received in relation to these matters received prior to the next planned publication date will be refused using the exemption under Section 22 of the FOI Act as it is information that we hold with the intention of publishing at some future (pre-scheduled) date.
The existing information available to you demonstrates that the Council has a process in place to regularly and routinely publish this information.
The Council recognises that at times information outside of this routine publication may be requested and that the Council should be open and transparent in its operations and more up to date information may assist this.
The information is, however, freely available on the Council’s website, and there is a statutory duty and timescale for publication. In accordance with the publication schedule quality and accuracy of information is checked.
To provide information outside of this schedule may impede the process and potentially impact on the quality and accuracy of the material disclosed.
As a consequence, having considered the balance of public interest in favour of both withholding and disclosing information, the Council considers that the arguments in favour of maintaining the exemption outweigh the arguments in favour of disclosing it.
Monthly reports
We publish procurement card reports monthly and in an easy and accessible format. This data is freely re-usable under the same terms as data.gov.uk.
If you require further information about any payments, please e-mail the Information Governance Team, setting out details of the payment and any additional information you require.
If you would like to know more about the type of business conducted with these suppliers, please visit Council Procurement Contacts.
We will always try to be as transparent as we can but in some cases we will need to respect information that could be seen as commercially sensitive or where the payment relates to vulnerable young people or adults. Some of this information is withheld as it is personal data. For further information about personal data please visit the Privacy & Disclaimer Statement.
