Armchair Auditor interview with Eddie Mair on BBC Radio 4 PM

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In the BBC radio car

Today, Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) released their spending data for April 2009-March 2010. (My easy-to-download zip file is here.) I was interviewed by Eddie Mair on Radio 4′s PM programme about my Armchair Auditor website and software which helps people to understand how their councils and the government spends their money. Scrub forward to 17:30 for the start of the story. Thankfully I didn’t get the Paxman vs. Howard treatment.

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Some more facts about SpotlightOnSpend for FullFact.org

Jul 08 2010 Published by under open data

Full Fact is a website that aims to find the true facts behind the spin and obfuscation of public debate. According to them:

Full Fact is an independent fact-checking organisation. We remove the spin from political statements and make it easier to see the facts and context behind the claims made by the key players in British political debate.

Our main work is to:

  • Analyse, challenge and expose misleading claims
  • Enable people to verify or rebut claims and campaign for improved standards

So I was interested to see how they’d tackle the controversy over Chris Taggart’s criticism of the way in which Spikes Cavell are publishing council spending data on their SpotlightOnSpend website.

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