Cornwall Council has been criticised for not publishing details of spending on payment cards and payments above £500, with one councillor saying it was “worrying”.

Under the Local Government Transparency Code local authorities are required to publish certain information in order to keep them open to scrutiny.

This includes information such as spending on payment cards issued to staff, expenditure of £500 and above and other details such as land owned by the council.

However Cornwall Council has not updated the information on what was spent on payment cards since March 2018 – with no details published at all for the entire financial year of 2018/19 and none so far for the current financial year.

Details of expenditure of £500 and above were last published in April 2019.

On its website the council states: “In 2015, the Government updated the Local Government Transparency Code which sets out categories of information that all Councils should be publishing. We already publish much of the information set out in the Code and we are in the process of finalising any information that is not already available.

“We are fully committed to the Code and have endeavoured to publish the information as fully as possible. There may be some cases where we are still working on publishing additional pieces of information that are not yet available. This is primarily down to changes required in information management systems where historically we have not collated or recorded information in a format that makes the information easily obtainable.”

However when the Local Democracy Reporting Service highlighted the delays in publishing the information the council sent a link to its website, where it said the information could be found. But the up-to-date information was not there.

The council also publishes responses to Freedom of Information requests which have been made to the authority – although this is not a requirement of the Local Government Transparency Code. This has not been updated since March 2019.

Conservative councillor James Mustoe said he would be asking questions of council officers as to why the information was not being published.

He said: “I am very concerned to hear that Cornwall Council appears to have lapsed in publishing important details about expensive transactions on its procurement cards.

“As with everything at County Hall, communication and transparency is key. This is public money, taxpayer money, they are spending and it is, of course, in the public interest that these figures should be published, both so that Cornwall councillors as well as the wider public can hold the officers and the organisation to account.

“That they do not appear to do so is worrying. Of course, it is hoped that they have not been on any madcap spending sprees with public money recently, but without the relevant publications in place, and with recent publicity generated about officers spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on trips abroad, these hopes might be a little optimistic.

“Turning to the the publication of Freedom of Information requests and their apparent lack of publication, this is also concerning. I have always been frustrated that, even as a Cornwall councillor, I have had to resort to using these requests in order to pry information out from the administration, as I had to do with the Cannes issue last year, but again, it is a matter of transparency, both to their councillors and the wider public.

“The FoI system exists for a reason and, again, it is Cornwall Council’s responsibility to show these requests, and their replies in good order when they are made and responded to.

“That this isn’t happening for both of the areas highlighted either indicates a tardiness on behalf of Cornwall Council as an organisation or, worse, a deliberate attempt to be un-transparent with information that belongs in the public domain and should be easy to access.

“The Conservative Group on Cornwall Council are there both to scrutinise how the administration runs things but also to ask questions that they might forget to put to the officers. We have now raised this with the officers and asked for answers. I will be interested to see their reply.”