What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data

The following article was originally published on the Guardian Datablog by Lisa Evans, the Lead Researcher on the OKF’s Where Does My Money Go? project.

We thought we were getting everything with the COINS release. In fact we were missing the best part of all: the Whole of Government Accounts.

Before he became chancellor George Osborne promised:

We will publish, shortly after coming to office, the Treasury’s COINS database that reports several thousand programme spending items in a consistent format across departments

Sure enough, in June, with George as our brand new chancellor, we saw the publication of COINS.

I’d been investigating the COINS (Combined Online Information System) prior to release and was expecting great things.

Like many others, we thought we would get a very detailed picture of the financial health of every government-funded body, because as the Treasury’s guide to COINS (pdf) explained: COINS is used for “the preparation of Whole of Government Accounts (WGA)”.

Now, I knew that the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) requires each public authority to complete a detailed record of what they own and what they have bought.

You can take a look at the form each authority has to fill out, it is called an L-pack.

You’ll see the kind of information the WGA gathers, details about bank accounts, shares owned and services bought. There were 553 Local Authorities and 320 NHS trusts and foundations who completed this form last year - that’s a lot of data.

On top of that, each central government body has to fill out a C-pack. Once complete, all the L-Packs and C-Packs are uploaded to COINS.

Then, on COINS, the completed records are audited. The auditing involves the WGA team checking that each exchange of money between departments is accurately recorded by both parties.

Auditing, I believe, means “matching up” buyers and providers of services and goods. For example, a perfect match would be if Barnet Council records the purchase of an item costing £5.5m from Enfield Council, and Enfield Council records the sale of the same item at £5.5m to Barnet Council. The COINS scripts would eliminate this to zero.

However if Barnet Council records the purchase of an item costing £5.0 m from Enfield Council and Enfield Council records a sale of the item as £5.5 m to Barnet Council, then COINS would eliminate 5.0m and and put 0.5M into suspense. The suspense account then needs to be investigated more, to see where the mistake is. This investigation is the job of the WGA team.

The WGA has been running every year, for 10 years. And how many results have the public seen from the whole exercse? Exactly zero.

When COINS was published I expected to see this rich body of WGA data, but none of it was there.

So, I investigated, resulting in my request for the WGA for 2008/09.

The reply was unlike anything else I have seen. The Treasury conducted a public interest survey which consisted of a list of pros and cons for release of the WGA data. The list of pros were that the public would benefit by seeing more of the process.

Amongst the list of cons where:

Ministers and officials need space in which to develop policy, including space for the development of policy through an interactive process of testing and refining ideas. This process could be weakened if information was released prematurely or when proposals where not finalised, as this could lead to poorer decision-making

Overall the cons won and my request was rejected.

There are no plans to publish any of the 10 years worth of “dry run” data from the WGA. But the 2009/10 data will be published in spring 2011 - I’m told this report will be similar to company accounts level of detail.

So, when we hear about greater transparency on public spending, it is important to bear in mind that we have made great progress but we don’t have the full picture yet.

About Lisa Evans

Lisa Evans is Lead Researcher on Where Does My Money Go? an
independent non-partisan project run by the Open Knowledge Foundation
which makes government spending and finances understandable to the general public - showing each of us where every pound of our taxes go

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Planning sessions for “Where Does My Money Go?”

Last week we had several planning sessions for our Where Does My Money Go? project - to discuss where to go next and what our priorities will be for the next major release.

We had some excellent feedback from the launch of our prototype before Christmas - and the release was covered in the BBC and in the Guardian!

In addition to continuing to improve, fix and add to our prototype as it is, we have been thinking about:

• what new features we should add
• what new data we should incorporate
• how best to piece together the data we want to collect
• how we can improve the visualisations and user interface
• how we can personalise what is shown to each user

In particular, we’re looking into:

• having a dedicated ‘data store’ for raw data, as well as an open API
• how to drill down into spending: more fine grained data, greater disaggregation
• collecting and aggregating more local information (my town, my region, etc.)
• spending per person
• breaking down the jargon (making it as easy as possible to understand how money is spent)
• deep linking and embedding visualisations in external services/applications
• search and querying

We’ve also started:

1. A new discussion list, wdmmg-discuss - so that anyone can follow what we are doing, make suggestions or get involved.
2. A new wdmmg group on CKAN. Until now we’ve been maintaining a list of UK public spending data we’re interested in on a Google Docs spreadsheet, but we’ve decided that its about time we started using CKAN, our open source registry of open data. (Did someone say dogfood?) Give us a shout if you’d like to become an administrator!

For anyone who is really curious, we’ve also uploaded our flipchart notes:

• Where Next? - 1 2 3 4 5 6
• Local spending and local data - 1 2 3

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Opening up UK local spending data

Just before Christmas, the UK Government announced a new report on Making local public expenditure data public, and the development of Local Spending Reports. The report outlines government plans to publish lots more information on where UK public money is spent at local level:

It is critical [...] that information on public expenditure should be clear, accessible and useful. We believe that spending by local authorities and other public bodies should be as transparent to delivery partners and local people as it can be. We want to make it easier for citizens to look right across all the local services in an area and spot evidence of duplication or waste, and hold providers to account.

The Government is therefore committed to the broader provision of local information, and Local Spending Reports sit within those plans as a major part of the central government offer to the information set available on local services and local places.

They suggest that opening up local government data on where public money is spent may encourage innovation in representing this data - and specifically cite the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go project, as well as Openly Local.

We are aware of the many excellent websites springing up which are providing innovative ways of looking at available public data and presenting it in very user-friendly formats; for example www.openlylocal.com/ (information on local councillors and council meetings) and Open Knowledge Foundation’s free interactive online tool for showing where UK public spending goes at www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/. This latter tool enables the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past six years in an intuitive way using an array of maps, timelines and graphs.

On New Year’s Eve there was an announcement about making existing UK local spending reports more detailed, more comprehensive and easier to query:

Local Spending Reports provide information about how public money is being spent in local areas including money going to police and fire services, transport and health.

This is all crucial information enabling people to see how their taxes are being put to use. But at the moment if people want to see not only what is being spent but what that money is delivering they would need to trawl through an array of different data, reports and statistics.

John Denham is clear that improving the quantity and quality of data in the public domain will not only increase transparency but will also be key to improving efficiency and securing better value for money.

Changes are therefore being proposed to improve the way that local spending reports are produced and presented. At the moment they exist as a series of excel spreadsheets. From next summer they will be published online in a clear and user friendly format that will enable the data to be easily interrogated.

The first UK local spending report (for 2006-7) was published earlier last year. Details of this are available at:

• http://ckan.net/package/uk-local-spending-report

Today Chris Taggart republished the first spending report it in a form which should make it easier to understand. Chris is our resident local data expert at Where Does My Money Go?, Founder of OpenlyLocal and invited expert on the UK Government’s Local Public Data Panel. In a blog post about the new release, Chris writes:

The first of those is now online, and it’s a good one, the 2006-07 Local Spending Report for England, published in April 2009. What is this? In a nutshell it lists the spending by category for every council in England at the time of the report (there have been a couple of new ones since then).

Now this report has been available to download online if you knew it existed, as a pretty nasty and unwieldy spreadsheet (in fact the recent report to Parliament, Making local public expenditure data public and the development of Local Spending Reports, even has several backhanded references to the inaccessibility of it).

However, unless you enjoy playing with spreadsheets (and at the very minimum know how to unhide hidden sheets and read complex formulae), it’s not much use to you. Much more helpful, I think, is an accessible table you can drill down for more details.

He’s done a great first pass at making this data easier to understand. To see what he’s done so far see:

• http://openlylocal.com/datasets/1

While this is currently experimental, in the future he plans to make it easy to export data in XML/JSON as well as to create more sophisticated visual representations of the data.

For anyone who is interested, we’ve also started a CKAN group for collecting data on UK public finance:

• http://ckan.net/group/wdmmg

We’ve also started a ‘reading list’ for key official documents and secondary sources on UK Government finance on the OKF wiki:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/wdmmg

If you’re interested in helping out with any of this - please get in touch!

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Where Does My Money Go? Prototype Launched

We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at:

• http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/

Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release:

Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this new tool will have a big impact on the way the public sector is held to account by UK citizens.

As well as being a great public benefit, Where Does My Money Go is also an immensely complicated tool to code and design. I applaud the team behind the project for their commitment and hard work. They’re leading the way in transparency and making a difference for the country.

Our press release below contains more background information on the new prototype. For all you microbloggers out there, here is a 136 character version of the project announce:

• RT @jwyg: New visualisations of #ukgov spending! See @okfn’s Where Does My Money Go? #wdmmg: http://bit.ly/4N2p5Y + http://bit.ly/8O4WEq

Press Release

Now more than ever, UK taxpayers will be wondering where public funds are being spent - not least because of the long shadow cast by the financial crisis and last week’s announcements of an estimated £850 billion price tag for bailing out UK banks. Yesterday’s pre-budget report also raises questions about spending cutbacks and how public money is being allocated across different key areas.

However, closing the loop between ordinary citizens and the paper-trail of government receipts is no mean feat. Relevant documents and datasets are scattered around numerous government websites - and, once located, spending figures often require background knowledge to interpret and can be hard put into context. In the UK there is no equivalent to the US Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires official bodies to publish figures on spending in a single place. There were proposals for similar legislation in 2007, but these were never approved.

On Friday 11th December the Open Knowledge Foundation will launch a free interactive online tool for showing where UK public spending goes. The Where Does My Money Go? project allows the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past 6 years in an intuitive way using an array of maps, timelines and graphs. By means of the tool, anyone can make sense of information on public spending in ways which were not previously possible.

For example, while playing around with the tool, we noticed:

• Total public spending as a percentage of gross domestic product this year increased to levels not seen since the recession of 1992.
• Healthcare spending in real terms under New Labour has almost doubled since they came to power in 1997. Education spending has increased by 75%.
• The UK spends more on old age than on education. The amount of money spent to support those in retirement is £87bn compared to the £82bn on the whole of education.
• £665 was spent in Northern Ireland on housing and amenities for every man, woman and child in 2008-9, compared to £413 in London. Spending per capita in Britain’s capital on housing, transport and public order and safety all exceeded the national average by over 60%.

Notes to editors

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to improving the way knowledge is shared. The Where Does My Money? project was a winner of the Cabinet Office’s Show Us A Better Way competition. The project benefits from an advisory group which includes leading transparency advocates and information visualisation experts. The prototype was conceived by the Open Knowledge Foundation and developed with data visualisation specialists iconomical, based in Amsterdam. The Foundation is also currently working with the UK Government on the technology behind the new data.gov.uk site.

Currently the Where Does My Money Go prototype is based on data from HM Treasury - but the project team is working to collect, aggregate and incorporate much more fine-grained information, including on local spending. On Monday Gordon Brown announced plans to publish much more detailed information on public spending in a more systematic way as part of the Smarter Government initiative.

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Alpha Release of Where Does My Money Go? Prototype

We’ve pleased to announce the alpha release of our Where Does My Money Go prototype. This is a web application that allows you to explore UK public spending - and you can take a look here:

• http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/wdmmg-alpha/

Update: access underlying data here.

This an “alpha” release and its still a way from finished - we’re putting this out in the spirit of “release early, release often”. We’d greatly appreciate your feedback on specific bugs or problems - as well as your two cents on the prototype so far. Also we’d love your thoughts about issues that we’re aware of and currently working on:

• There are some issues with resizing for different screens. We have noticed things don’t look quite right with 1024 resolution screens. E.g. text overlaps in places.
• The national section is not yet functional.
• We are using the terminology derived from the datasets we are using, but are concerned that that this is rather jargonny and inaccessible.

So - over to you! What do you think? What could we do better?

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New mockups for “Where Does My Money Go?”

We recently blogged about some mockups for our Where Does My Money Go? project. We’ve now got some new mockups for the project which are show below (click through for full size).

Again, we’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave a comment below, or pop a note to our discussion list.

One thing to note is that these are only static mockups of what will be interactive visualizations. Animation will primarily be along time axis in the region view, and diving down into spending functions in the function view. A dynamic prototype is on its way soon!

All the data we’re using is available from: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/data/

By Region

By Function

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First mockups for “Where Does My Money Go?”

We are currently building a prototype for the Where Does My Money Go? - and we’ve now got the first mockups of what the site will look like…

For full size versions you can see:

• spending by function

We’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave a comment below, or pop a note to our discussion list.

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New developments on ‘Where Does My Money Go?’

We’ve been doing some more work on Where Does My Money Go?. The project, will provide an interactive represention of UK public finance using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies.

We’ve now put together a basic visualisation based on data we’ve cleaned up from the Treasury:

• http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/dept/

We’ve also had confirmation from the Cabinet Office that there will be some funding available to develop a prototype of the project. We’ve been talking about what to do next on the project on our discussion list. If you have any suggestions or comments - let us know!.

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BarCamp UKGovWeb 2009

Last Saturday was BarCamp UKGovWeb at the Ministry of Justice. There were plenty of new faces in addition to the usual suspects!

Three sessions that we found particularly interesting:

1. Directgov and Innovation: Directgov have launched a new innovate part of their site, and are keen on supporting innovation around government data (mashups, services, etc.) from outside government. In particular they are keen on the idea of a ‘data wiki’ for government datasets - which is basically what CKAN is for, as we discussed at the Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information in November. We hope we will be able to work with the Directgov team on this!

2. Show Me The Money: Uncannily ‘Show Me The Money’ was the original working title for the project that is now Where Does My Money Go?. The idea for the session was also very similar. We had an interesting discussion about the background of similar projects in the US, relevant legislation, problems getting hold of public finance data, and had a look at where we were up to with WDMMG. A handful of new people were interested in getting involved in the project.

3. Open government data: There were quite a few people interested in having a session on re-using government data (as you can see in this picture). Again, discussion was focused on what those inside and outside of government could do to make it easier to find and re-use public information - and there was allusion to CKAN and the November workshop. There was some interesting input from the Office of National Statistics, Tom Steinberg, John Sheridan, Harry Metcalfe, the Directgov team and a new open government data project in the Netherlands commissioned by the Dutch government.

You can see our photos on Flickr and below are a set of rough notes.

Session 1 - Directgov and innovation

• Cross departmental innovation
• External re-users
• Find data
• APIs for mashups
• Is this Directgov’s remit?
• GovTalk - is a bit like this
• Live data for test purposes
• How does this fit in with OPSI’s remit?
• Brilliant opportunity
• Don’t know what this will be or how it will turn out (if we did it wouldn’t be innnovation)
  • Phase 1: Wordpress blog - with ideas about discussion/space
  • Phase 2: Linking to things, relationship with Show Us A Better Way
  • Then possibly hosting something - rewired state..
• Year long vision: data, applications spontaneously created linked to, debate about what this all means for different service owners
• Q: What is your objective? (Re-write the orange site? Why innovate?)
• A: Talent tapping.. If something interesting is happening, why aren’t we able to tap into it? Harnessing stuff that is good, that takes thing onto another level..
• R&D team within Directgov: semantic web, new ways of organising content, data…
• Imperfect/experimental applications
• Exposing data - makes it easier to innovate
• By exposing stuff you get innovation
• Important social point: APIs is where we should be focusing creative effort, building communities shouldn’t be directly focused on building communities - but on making data available for community to use
• Data, aggregating, cleaning
• Cleaning, exposing data - monumental task
• Bands of data hunters
• Whole dataset rather than bit that you want
• NHS: likes to think it can do everything for everybody
  • Policy people relieved about innovative thing..
  • Social Innovation Camp people - interesting approach, gets ideas out, engaging people..
• Can we borrow innovative approaches?
• First point about APIs: deep security issue here.. (’blag that gaff’)
• GovTalk - open space (also closed space to discuss what they are holding)
• People often don’t know what they are holding (hence reluctance to give out…)
• innovate.direct.gov.uk
• Branding question
• Directgov or cabinet office?
• Is this heart and soul part of what Directgov is doing?
• Worked at statistics: banging head against the wall trying to get post-clean up data from colleagues - ‘left in disgust, frustration and anger’
• Promise it will not be centralised innovation unit?
• Doing it because you want direct gov to make it better?
• Discovering uncovering latent need
• Data rather than services?
• Letting others innovate
• How ecosystem works: get people interested in api/data stuff, new data/services
• ‘Directgov app store’
• Open source model - interesting things will be done by other people
• Effective development
• Why would people do things for free?
• Because they want a better service
• Look at FOSS, look at Wikipedia
• Couldn’t they break something?
• Taking data and developing new services
• Mentality of million pound projects versus 10-30k project off the ground
• COI small developers framework
• Break the rules, get some excellence and work out which rules you need to reinstate
• Process is organisational scar tissue
• Directgov innovate site
• Rewired state
• Focus on innovation, services, etc.
• Like twitter feed
• Aimed at developer/innovator community
• Press release went out yesterday
• All the right sponsoring behaviours, hearts and minds will follow
• Comment: ‘am I allowed to comment?’
• Innovation space received special place in report
• Warmly received by minister
• Not innovating if everything you do goes perfectly
• Need a concept of noble failure - otherwise we’re not going to get anywhere
• If this doesn’t work, next thing will work better
• Where is data going to come from?
• Hope people will expect to find data
• Good clean data
• Only way it could fail is if nothing happens
• New links to awesome datasets
• Data dumps + licensing + terms and conditions for APIs
• Good intentions at start
• Talking to John Sheridan about licensing etc.
• Talking about things/stuff + communities
• Want to find what people want - rather than saying its about X, Y + Z… its all sorted out funded, big contract, etc…

Session 3: Show Me The Money

• Richard Fahey
• Why transparency important
• Fedspending
• Whats happening in UK?
• Why transparency?
  • Accountability for gov officials + elected officials
  • Positive incentives (people know where money is going - creates positive incentive to do the right thing, create more efficiency, etc.)
  • Enables collaboration (Apps For Democracy, Congressopedia, …) insight into data
  • US organisations doing this - Sunlight Foundation, etc.
• Fedspending OMB Watch
  • Information on contracts
  • Top contracts, individual contracts
  • Data from several agencies (federal procurement agency, …)
  • Goes down to transaction level detail (contract spec, start, end, price, etc.)
  • 2006 legislation + website to see all data
  • £600k - USAspending.gov, tender process, OMB bid lowest (already had tech)
  • Originally thought £15m to run for 2006-7, but ended up being cheaper
• June 2007, government spending (website) bill
• Did not get required number of mps to vote - only a few turned up
• We could have had usaspending.gov
• Try to revitalise the website spending bill?
• Try to gather data ourselves?
• Where Does My Money Go project:
  • Idea originally had same working title (Show Me The Money) back in mid 2006
  • Winning Show Us A Better Way competition entry
  • Support from HMT
  • Start with Red Book and take it from there
  • Predicated on notion of citizen’s relation to institutions around them
  • ‘My money has helped to build this road, to run this school, to pay staff at this hospital, …’
  • Hence greater sense of involvement + realising investment in public life
  • Start with low hanging fruit, and go from there
  • Idea of closing loop between citizens and public bodies - citizens know where their money is spent
  • Not all data is there but interesting to start with what is already there to demonstrate what is possible. An exemplar that might encourage more to publish relevant data.
  • Demo of Where Does My Money Go collection and cleaning of data from HMT, with basic visualisation.
• Richard: start with the bailout?
• Start with things that are already published?
• Should we try and bring bill to gov? Should we try and gather data ourselves? What should we do?
• Cost of gathering data - mandate to submit info from relevant departments
• Do we have the data in uk?
• Yes - on procurement systems
• Bombard with FOI requests
• Monthly FOI requests?
• Commercial confidentiality
• Audit commission act
• House address - costing
• John Sheridan:
  • OPSI has handwritten purchase order (one part to supplier, other 4 parts to accountants, etc.)
  • Its not as though data is always there
  • Data not available in formats that make this easy to do
  • Are our systems geared up to this level of transparency? No - they are not.
• Alasdair Mangham - they must have an account
• Several bank accounts local council run - monthly payment settling costs with contractors, need invoices
• Very redacted invoices
• Julian: need to know what you’ve got for the money - not just what money is spent
• What the contract was? + what was cost of contract? was it correct? over-spending?
• Incentive mechanisms
• Pork barrel political culture - people are keen to open up
• We don’t have same sense of semi-corruption as in us
• Nothing improves value for money as transparency
• Transparency - reasonable steps to ensure value for money when spending public money
• Powerful mechanism to ensure efficient spending
• 2 pronged approach (exemplars + legislation)
• EU tendering system
• GCAT + SCAT - catalogue pre-tendered for services
• Can file without european union journal
• Commercially sensitive
• Contracting out of freedom of information
• Difficult to get people to disclose contracts (take away power of negotiation)
• Start by looking at bailout money
• SEC
• Something that indicated where gaps are - mapping public finance data
• Start with what we have - visualising that
• Why website bill rather than data
• Regional development fund
• Accounting + obfuscation
• Bottom up, top down
• Obligation to publish annual account
• Guardian graphic representing public finance (PDF)
• Moving forward with WDMMG:
  • Carbon copy an email to all interested
  • Continue to collect existing relevant data, low hanging fruit
  • Built something to give an indication of what is possible, an exemplar, that could be scaled with more data..

Session 4: Open data

• We pay for it - we want to use it
• Lets make it easy
• APIs
• Difficulty of getting data
• Imperfect data
• Could people inside/outside government help this process along
• Give us what you have and we’ll fix it
• Should every gov dep have their own API
• Standard API?
• Clearing house for data?
• National statistics
• Quite common for census data
• US - thinking can be applied in other countries
• More data, more apis, whip up cool services very quickly
• Available + re-usable (click use license)
• Not necessarily in format you want
• ONS publishes data
• Steps for people publishing data (dutch gov)
• OKF working on service to find/register government datasets: CKAN (see uk tag)
• Critical data that isn’t available
• Core business of gov
• Underlying regime is very permissive
• Cultural issues
• Next bit of POI taskforce will come out
• Done research and see there is something wrong
• Ministers will see this - senior civil servants
• Extended click-use license
• Where do you go?
• GNIP
• GeoCommons, Free the Postcode, …
• What Do They Know
• FOI request
• Rewired State
• Unique Identifiers -
• Snap codes to identify administrative boundaries
• Companies house - can’t go to companies house with URL
• Funding has to follow demand
• Proportional funding (at least one person must have asked for it)
• Camden council
• If there is a request £10k minimum to deal with data requests (like FOI)
• John Sheridan: OPSI requests might add up to £400k
• 2 ministers supportive of this: Tom Watson + Michael Wills
• There is serious commitment - money not there
• innovate.direct.gov.uk
• Is this data useful?
• Are there killer apps?
• Tom Steinberg: what is the most interesting dataset that exists in some form that could be used to build a really compelling killer app? What is exciting?
  • Public toilet data
  • Electric car chargers
  • Jobs

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Vote for ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ at the Show Us A Better Way poll!

The Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign has set up a poll to help gather people’s opinions on the best entrants for the Show Us A Better Way competition run by the Power of Information Task Force. They also wrote about this in the Guardian a few days back.

As we recently posted about, we entered an idea that we’ve had on the backburner for a while, called ‘Where Does My Money Go?’. In a nutshell, this would be:

A web application that would interactively represent UK government budgetary information using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies.

You can vote for the idea at the Show Us A Better Way poll, and see the proposal at the competition page.

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