Spend with suppliers 2011/12

As the Commission is regularly publishing details of all spending over 500, we thought an explanation of our spending activity and arrangements would be helpful.

Following the Secretary of State’s 13 August announcement to disband the Audit Commission, we have begun to wind down the organisation, but our activity continues through to the end of 2012. We still have a programme of work to deliver, legal duties to meet, obligations to our staff, and a property portfolio to maintain. This means we will continue to incur expenditure on goods and services to meet these requirements and will publish each month details of any spending over 500. Our Annual Reports and Accounts are laid before Parliament, and have, of course, always been in the public domain.

We are subject to the legal and regulatory framework for public sector procurement. Our rules governing, for example, expenses, travel, hotel accommodation and use of non- Audit Commission facilities are in line with those of government departments and other public sector bodies.

We are also accountable for achieving best value for money and are open to legal challenge under the EC public procurement directives and related UK regulations. These are reflected in our detailed governance arrangements and financial policies.

Our decisions to buy goods and services are in line with business need and comply with our own governance arrangements and financial policies.

Local audit is a labour-intensive business requiring qualified, skilled and experienced employees. The Commission’s in-house audit practice of nearly 900 staff covers all of England. Our auditors need to work from several local body offices. Most of our spending therefore goes on employees, employee related expenses such as travel and overnight accommodation, and employee training and development.

While we rely heavily on electronic means of communication, being a national business means we sometimes need to bring our employees together for training, and to discuss work programmes and secure consistency. We also need to meet clients to better support them, consult with them and tell them about developments.

Our audit work follows a cycle linked to a March financial year-end for local bodies. This leads to peaks and troughs in our audit work. We overcome this by hiring consultants and contractors at peak work times as well as to do specialist audit work, rather than incur the extra costs of employing more full time staff throughout the year.

The Audit Commission also publishes studies into value for money and financial management. We therefore incur costs associated with these. We publish reports digitally, but we also spend money on printing, publishing and disseminating studies. This expenditure also covers the costs of reporting local audits to the bodies concerned.

The spend reports are available as CSV files. This format uses a standard column width and not all information may be visible. To view all the data you may need to expand the column width. It isn’t practical to publish in detail the business reason for all spend over 500, but we can provide further information, on request, for any items of spend.

This information is also available on the Department for Communities and Local Government website (external link) and on www.data.gov.uk (external link).