1. Please can you advise the following information on contract 3843774 to the value of £35750 on the 31st august. What was procured and for which site?

The Council are refusing this request under Section 43 of the Act (Commercial Interests). Our reasons for doing so are as follows.

Whilst we are obligated to publish our spend over £499.99 on our website, we may not be able to divulge specifics of what those transactions are spent on if it could impact on individuals or organisations commercial interests. We work with a pool of contractors, that are initially vetted to be quoting within a certain bandwidth, and delivering with certain requirements on the projects that the Council are involved with. If we were to publish the specifics of what these costs covered in terms of projects and delivery, this would allow competitors to analysis and review the data which would effectively bypass any benchmarking and procurement process. Companies would then have knowledge of the services being provided to what cost and providing the pricing information against what was delivered (or expected to be delivered) would allow for an unfair advantage to competitors for future projects. This would give them an advantage in future tender and procurement processes as they will be able to tailor their submissions so that it would appear the most favourable option due to knowing what competitors are able to achieve and at what cost.

The Council have to consider getting the best value for money in using public funds with the services it provides and commissions. Releasing this information would not only harm the current contractor(s), this could lead to the Council paying higher costs in the long run, and prevent us from getting the best value for money from future contracts. This would impact on our ability to negotiate and consider the tender applications in a fair manner and could also reduce the pool of appropriate contractors in the future as they would unlikely wish to continue working with the Council if we revealed their commercially sensitive information which would in turn restrict us from options to choose from and able to increase contract demands due to the reduced options to select from.

It would not be in the Public Interest in releasing the information as to do so would hinder the Council in achieving the best value of public monies being spent. Therefore the exemption outweighs the public interest and the exemption applies.