I am delighted that council yesterday unanimously approved a motion that Barnet Council publish all spending over £500 on Barnet.gov.uk from the next financial year.Politics is still reverberating from the furore over Westminster politicians expenses and everyone in the political process has to look at how we can reassure the general public that politics, and public servants for that matter, are almost all good people doing good work for the benefit of the country.

We have probably been over concerned about how critics can misuse information rather than trusting in the good sense of the population as a whole.  I have now decided to start publishing my expenses on this blog every month in a clear form. Frankly these have been available to critics under the Freedom of Information Act for years and are regularly requested by journalists using the act to trawl for scandal across the UK (the expense to the taxpayer of such fishing requests is something I should return to another time). 

 I trust publishing these figures here will demonstrate to critics and cynics, and to you, that Barnet has nothing to hide.