Shadow UK Chancellor George Osborne has sent me (and I suspect thousands of others) a link to his new idea - a Bill requiring publication of all sums spent by all government departments exceeding £25,000 within thirty days of the expense being incurred.

Let me be clear. I have no problem with transparency. I like it. But there are real problems in this bill:

1. Is £25,000 to be set as a total contract value, or for each payment? In other words, are we talking cash or accruals here?
2. How is the data to be structured? For example, if I want to know about health spending in West Norfolk (where I live) will I be able to get to that?
3. Does it really help me to know the suppliers details at this level of spending, especially if I cannot get hold of their accounts to see how they made use of the funds and whether it is likely that they over-charged or not as indicated by excess profit? Remember over 90% of all UK companies do not have to publish profit and loss accounts and this makes them almost unaccountable for the sums they receive.
4. Will I be able to aggregate payments by supplier, department, project, area, by purpose of spend, etc?
5. Will I be able to tell the difference between revenue and capital spending?
6. Will I be able to compare spending with budgets to assess whether the costs I am seeing are being controlled, or not?

I could raise many more such questions. I won't because I am aware that George Osborne is playing a game and that he knows that his Bill has no chance of success, which is why these points are not answered within it. But I have little real problem with his game a long as he is serious in his intent, because one of the biggest objections to paying tax is the claim people make that they do not know how it is spent (even though, if truth be told quite large amounts of information on this are readily available on line for those with serious enquiry to make).

So, please do it George, but answer the difficult questions your request raises so that we know how it would work. And do one other thing at the same time. Please ensure that the recipients of government money are accountable for it. So right now go bank to the Companies Bill that has just been passed and ask that all companies in receipt of payment from the UK government, whether incorporated in the UK or not publish full accounts on the web, free to access for all, so that they can be held to account as well. I call that a level playing field, and I think that's fair.