Walsall council is committed to being open and transparent about who we are, how we work, make decisions and spend public money.

All local authorities have a statutory duty to publish information; The Local Government Transparency Code sets out a minimum amount of data that local authorities should publish as ‘Open Data’.

The following Information is therefore published routinely by Walsall Council as part of the Transparency Code.

·         Council Expenditure

·         Senior salaries, senior salaries count  and organisation chart

·         The pay multiple

·         Trade union facility time

·         Local land assets

The following is available on the Councils main website.

·         The constitution

·         Parking accounts and  parking spaces

·         Procurement information

Public authorities also have statutory responsibilities to respond to direct requests for information under both the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations. Walsall Council is being proactive and publishing regularly requested information so that it is openly available.

·         Non Domestic Rating Assessment (NNDR)

Contact InformationRights@walsall.gov.uk

As part of the council’s commitment to demonstrating value for money and local government spending transparency, we are publishing details of:

1. all our payments made to a supplier to a greater value of £250+ and published on a monthly basis. For data protection reasons, some payments are redacted and hence not provided.
2. Government procurement card transactions, published quarterly, and detailing all transactions paid by Government Procurement Card. Government procurement cards are a form of business card (similar to a credit card) that allows public sector and charitable organisations to purchase high volume, lower value goods and services.

Walsall Council publishes annually information relating to the roles and salaries of senior officers and how they fit into the organisational structure.
Details of remuneration and job title of certain senior employees whose salary is at least £50,000, and

1. The number of employees whose remuneration in that year was at least £50,000 in brackets of £5,000
2. Employees whose salaries are £150,000 or more must be identified by name.
3. An organisation chart covering the top three management tiers of the organisation.

Section 38 (1) of the Localism Act 2011 requires English and Welsh local authorities to produce and publish a pay policy statement for each financial year available here

Pay Multiple is defined as the ratio between the highest paid taxable earnings for the given year and the median earnings figure for the whole of the authority's workforce.

Details of number of Union representatives, unions recognised and union spend, published annually, including;

·         absolute number and full time equivalent (FTE) of staff who are TU reps

·         absolute number and FTE of TU reps who devote at least 50% of their time to TU activity

·         names of all Unions represented at Walsall Council

·         basic estimate of spend on unions as a % of the total pay bill

Land and buildings form part of local authorities’ fixed assets and details of these must be published as open data. Most authorities hold an asset register for land and buildings and annually publish the overall value of their fixed assets as part of their statement of accounts also.

Publication of Non Domestic Rates;

1. All Accounts - a list of all rate accounts
2. Write Backs - a list of rate accounts where credit was written back, since 1991

Meta data available here

Our NNDR publication scheme is available here; including an explanation of why the council no longer publishes Non Domestic Accounts in Credit.