A four-year plan to ensure public cohesiveness by making council reports more accessible to the public has been announced by Sheffield City Council.

Promises have been made to publish charts to the public so that Freedom of Information – FOI – requests are no longer needed in order to access data. 

The change comes after the Local Government Association – LGA – published a peer review, which outlined the need for community engagement and clear ‘City Goals’. 

The council have said they are to use interactive reports internally to allow the public to scrutinise the procedures they have put in place. 

The demand for council data to become more transparent heightened in 2022, when data was withheld from FOI requests throughout the tree felling scandal. 

Anti-tree felling campaigner, Paul Selby, said the announcement to make council data public information “changes nothing”.

The data is estimated to be released by late 2024 to early 2025.

Councillor. Angela Argenzio described the plan as ‘promising’. She said: “[the plan] will hopefully give us the opportunity to be more transparent”. 

Councillor Ben Miskell called for the expedition of the process of publishing charts to the public. He said the plan was ‘important’ and that it showed that “the culture of the organisation is changing”.  

Further improvements to the council’s progress include setting targets, quarterly and annual progress reports, and making data nationally comparable.