Exeter City Council has chosen to publish its data only on a quarterly basis, instead of the Governments best practice of Monthly publishing.
On 5th February 2026 we attended a meeting of the Exeter City Council Customer Focus Scrutiny Committee. We had already submitted a request asking them to move to MONTHLY REPORTING which is the Local Government Assocation's recommended BEST PRACTICE
Their reply was that as a small authority they did not have the resources to publsih data monthly
This reply, delivered on behalf of the exeter City Council Leader (who was not present at the meeting) seemed "strange" to the questioner who relying on his significant local government audit experience understood that the report was in the form of a template which once used could be run repeatedly without further work, with only the need to change the date parameter for the reporting period.
We therefore made a formal Freedom of Information Request to establish how much computer time it took to run the report for one quarter (the existing practice)
The reply was that it took 30 minutes to run the report
It in therefore our OPINION that Exeter City Council would prefer electors NOT to have timely information as to how they spend YOUR TAXES
So what sort of amounts are we talking about ??
For the financial year 2025-26 Exeter city's published non-redacted spending in compliance with the requirements of The Local Government Transparency code 2015 was £61.3 Million
For the first quarter of 2026-27( ie apr 2026 to June 2026) the spend was £14 Million
BUT knowing the total spend is only the beginning of this journey. We need to know who the recipients are & what the purpose of the spending is as revealed in the coding within the accounting system