FOI request (FOIR-792136756)

Please provide a summary of all payments made by Hastings Borough Council between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2025 to external parties (i.e. recipients who are not directly employed by the Council and paid via PAYE).

For the purposes of this request, I am seeking a two-part accounting outcome:

A. Declared / itemised external spending The total value of payments where the recipient, amount, and purpose are recorded in the Council’s financial systems and are capable of public disclosure.

B. Undeclared / non-itemised external spending The total value of payments to external parties where full itemisation is not available, not held, aggregated, redacted, exempt, or otherwise incapable of disclosure.

Where precise figures are not available, please provide the best available summary held by the Council and clearly label any such entries as “data not available”, rather than omitting them.

This request includes all payment mechanisms used by the Council, but does not require reconstruction or creation of new data beyond existing records.

In addition, please provide:

A brief statement explaining why a full, detailed accounting of all external payments is not already available for public disclosure, if this is the case.

The date of the Council’s most recent completed financial audit, and the name of the auditing body.

If the information is already held in a ledger extract or financial summary, I am content to receive it in that form.