Central government departments should be subject to the same £500 threshold for spending transparency as local government, Whitehall experts and public procurement data pioneers have recommended.

The call is contained in a joint spending study issued 25 June by the influential Institute for Government (IfG) think-tank and the Spend Network, which provides, the authors claim, the first detailed insight into central and local government expenditure.

Data analysts spent more than 16,000 hours examining 38 million financial transactions conducted in 2013 between all central government departments, government agencies and upper tier local authorities and a supplier base of more than 180,000 providers.