My hon. Friend Richard Burden is to be congratulated on securing the last debate of the year and on using his time to raise an issue that concerns him, his constituents, many hon. Members and the Government.

My hon. Friend stressed the importance of transparency and accountability in the finances of Birmingham city council. I absolutely agree. It is incumbent on all of us, in any type of public service, be it in Birmingham or anywhere else, to ensure that we provide the information that citizens need and deserve. This is a priority for the Government and for me. After all, that information is the property of the citizens who employ us to deliver it. As our recent White Paper, "Putting the Front Line First: smarter government", makes clear, we want to give people the tools they need to help to shape the services they depend on.

We also want to give people the tools they need to hold Government to account at all levels, as my hon. Friend has done today. Technology has a key role to play in building this new relationship. It is liberating and illuminating. It opens two-way channels of communication between citizens and professionals and helps to provide the increased transparency that he is seeking. The Government will help with this transparency by publishing unprecedented amounts of information and data about the institutions, expenditure and people that serve the public. However, the mere publication of data is not enough-we have to contextualise them and ensure that they are understandable and allow for comparisons, particularly across front-line services. We want to stress outcomes, delivery and value for money in that data, which will be available in reusable form by 2011. We will work with local government to develop comparable measures of value for money across a range of local government services. We will consult on those measures from spring 2010 and publish them in 2011.

My hon. Friend made particular reference to Birmingham's working neighbourhoods fund. I can assure him that we are working extremely closely with the city council and the local strategic partnership, Be Birmingham, to ensure that we move on from the slow start and slow delivery that led to the underspend in the £118 million or so of grant. We want to ensure that spending gets back on track. Birmingham city council has said itself that the underspend is not good enough, and when 37 per cent. of the working age population are workless, it certainly is not good enough. However, it is not right to penalise the people of Birmingham by holding back funding that their deprived areas desperately need.