A Big Part of COINS was not Published

This is a post by Lisa Evans, lead researcher on Where Does My Money Go?.

When I saw the COINS data that was published at the beginning of June, I suspected there was something missing.

I had been reading about the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) — a project to provide a really good detailed overview of government finances (more information in this previous post).

I was therefore expecting to see the local council assets and accruals data of the sort that is recorded in the L-packs as well as central government spending captured annually in the C-packs. But it wasn’t there.

I conducted some more investigation, speaking to the team at the Whole Of Government accounts. There team is really quite small — only two people in Communities and Local Government WGA team and five or six people in the Treasury — but they do an amazing job of documenting all public assets and accruals. What is more, they have been running it every year for 10 years, each year gathering a detailed picture of local authorities financial health.

Anyway, based on my existing knowledge and my conversations with the WGA team and others, I can now confidently confirm the WGA is completely absent from the COINS data that was released. This means there is no reporting of local authority’s spending in COINS. A report from the WGA is planned spring next year. But I believe this will be at a very high level of detail — the sum of the whole government’s assets and accurals, not the details of individual authorities and departments.

I have requested the 2008/2009 WGA data, with the Department of Health and the Department of Defence data removed, as I believe these two departments may have failed the relevant audit.

Now we’ll wait to see what happens.

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Related posts:

1. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
2. COINS: A Users Guide
3. Understanding COINS

Understanding COINS

Something amazing has happened since the government spending recorded in the COINS database was made openly available to everyone. I’m talking about the impressive range of free, and in many cases open source, products to display the COINS data.

So far there are COINS search engines from The Guardian and The Open Knowledge Foundation, graphs from Rapid Gate Way and Alpine Interactive and bloggers like Martin Budden have been powering away on their own projects to describe the COINS data. What a triumph for publishing government data. It beats the alternative of using public funds to pay for these tools when the skills and enthusiasm are clearly out there in the community.

That’s not to say that the products to display the data are complete right now, or that we have understood the COINS data completely. We had a few clues about the structure of the data from previous research, but there is no substitute for having the data itself, and we are still building up our knowledge. But given it’s been just over a week since we first laid eyes on the data, I think it’s fair to say that we are making good progress by most IT project standards.

In this post I want to address two questions that drive our thinking at the Open Knowledge Foundation, since the COINS publication. They are: ‘what’s important in COINS?’ and ‘how do we get meaningful results out of it?’

It has taken some discussion with the exceptionally helpful staff at HM Treasury and reading the COINS Guidance(PDF) and other related materials that make more sense now we can see the data — but finally I feel we have more accurate answers to both of these questions.

What’s important in COINS?

The COINS Guidance lists every field in the version of COINS that was released. One of the big challenges with a big complicated data set, like COINS, is knowing which of these fields are important.

To determine this I’ve spoken with the Treasury team about the fields they consider most useful, and the combination of fields they use most frequently.

The answers I got focused mainly on the central government spending and income data.

The spending and income is described for each central government department which you can see in the ‘Department description‘ field. Each department has a number of programmes that will either require or generate money. The department’s programmes are in the ‘programmes object group description‘ part of COINS, and more detail still is in the ‘programme objects description‘, and yet more detail still is in the ‘account codes‘ which are all listed in Annex B.

The ‘Value‘ field tells the actual spending or income in thousands of pounds. If the number is positive it refers to the departments spending, if negative it refers to the department’s income. It should also be able to check if the amount is spending or income from the ‘account code’.

In addition to the spending programme and ‘account code’ information, there are two further categories in COINS that describe the data very usefully, those are:

• ‘budget boundary‘. There are three choices for ‘budget boundary’: 1) DEL which stands for Departmental Expenditure Limits. These are items that have been budgeted for 3 years, it is estimated that DEL makes up about 80% of the items in COINS. 2) AME which stands for Annually Managed Expenditure. These are the budget items that are difficult to predict accurately and the risk for these is taken by the Exchequer as a whole. We are ignoring everything in AME where the ‘Programme /admin’ is not set to ‘Other’. 3) ‘not DEL/AME’ is budgeting for arm.s length bodies — we are not too concerned about these budget items.
• the ‘resource capital‘. There are two options that are both useful for .resource capital. which are 1) ‘capital’ which is investment and capital assets. 2) ‘resource’ which includes all wages, salaries and operating costs.

There are some parts of COINS that we are less concerned with at the moment.

Other than the expenditure and income data, there are plans and estimates in COINS. You can see plans and estimates that should roughly correspond to the supplementary budget information and the supply estimates, respectively. We have been less concerned with plans and estimates as, by their nature, they will be less detailed than the outturn.

There is a CPID code in COINS which is there for a special project within the Treasury called the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA). This project will ensure that there is no double counting of the money when a transaction occurs between government departments. As I understand it, if body A gives money to body B then WGA would be responsible for subtracting the amount body B received from body A’s total. There are scripts in COINS to ‘best guess’ these subtractions using the CPID code, along with the WGA staff performing lots of checks too, but once this matching has been successful the CPID code is largely redundant.

The Whole of Government Accounts also collects information about spending by local authorities and records this spending in COINS, but this is not in a publishable state. However it is possible to view central government grants for local authorities with the field called ‘Local Government Use only‘.

How do I get meaningful results out of COINS?

On the advice of the Treasury guidance we are focusing on the Fact Table more than the Adjustment Table in COINS. In the fact table the field that defines actual spending and income is the ‘Data_type‘ being set to ‘Outturn’ and ‘Data_subtype‘ being set to ‘approved’ or = submitted_outturn (both of these conditions required).

In addition we can set Budget_Boundary to either DEL or if we require the shorter term budget spending then we set AME and then set programme/admin to ‘Other’.

For the 2009-2010 COINS data we can also set the Resource_capital2: set to Resource (on 2010-11 budgeting basis).

With the COINS data defined this way it is then possible look at the spending programmes and associated account codes certain that the results are actual spending and actual income for the time frame, rather than estimated or planned spending or income.

It is wonderful that the publication of COINS has brought so much innovation in the open software community. It will be even more wonderful if we can continue to develop to make public spending data easier to understand, particularly when so many important decisions are being made that will affect our lives.

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Related posts:

1. COINS: A Users Guide
2. The Hunt For COINS
3. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data

COINS: A Users Guide

At 0930 BST today the UK government released the COINS database, one of the biggest sources of information on UK public spending. Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock says:

The release of this data marks another milestone in the opening up of public data - in which the UK leads the way. While this is by no means the end of the line, this material is substantially more detailed than anything previously available and is a major advance for transparency of public finances.With our Where Does My Money Go? project we’ve already been working to make spending understandable to the general public and this new data is essential to realizing the project’s goal of showing exactly where each pound of your taxes goes.

Update: for latest info see http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/data/coins/

Lets be honest — it’s basically mystery how our tax money is spent. Like all good mysteries it’s compelling to find the truth behind it.

The publication of the COINS database today will a big step forward in resolving this mystery. COINS, which stands for the Combined Online Information System, is the main database used by HM Treasury for budgeting — and reconciling what actually happened against those budget plans.

Public bodies have a requirement to report their spending to COINS. Each local government body, and this includes all councils (except parish), all local police, local fire, local transport and park authorities, report all items of spending over £1million once a year. The record of this spending is gathered by Communities and Local Government (CLG) and audited before it is entered into COINS as spending from CLG.

Similarly, each central government department has to report spending on all items over £1 million and agreements over £5 million and that they define this spending use their own spending codes for this. Some of these items are well defined in COINS — others less so.

Each of these bodies provide not only their spending once a year, but also estimates of their spending for the year ahead, once a month for every item of spending.

With the publication of COINS we can now see, for the first time all in one place, the spending and estimates for all of these public bodies.

But bringing this all together has a slight problem — there’s lots of accounting jargon that we can cut through here, to understand the great significance and value of this publication.

COINS: A User Guide

Permanent url: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/data/coins/

COINS is a big listing of estimated or actual entries of money.

Each entry in the listing involves a named goverment department’s money.

Some of the entries show a department has bought something like a service or a product. Other entries show a department has recieved some money.

Key features:

• Programme objects and Programme object groups: each department creates Programme Objects to which spendings is assigned.
• Account types (SCOA = Standard Chart of Government Accounts): standard “accounting-like” classifications of spending. Details of how the money is recieved or spent, so you can choose all spending on Wages & salaries or Current Grants to private sector.
• CPID: If money is exchanged between government departments we have a record of which departments were involved. The Counter-party Identifier (CPID) in the entry line is the description of the other department.
• Data type: Each of the monthly and yearly budgeting exercises can be identified with the Data Type category. Examples of these are Forecast Outturn March, Forecast Outturn April etc.

The release of the COINs data is a huge step forward for transparency in the UK. We hope that the release of the data will lead to much better public understanding of how public funds are being spent. We’ve been very keen to get hold of the COINS data for our Where Does My Money Go? project and our team are already on the case, working to create intuitive visual representations of the data. If you’d like to follow our progress, you can find us at wheredoesmymoneygo.org or on Twitter at @wdmmg!

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Related posts:

1. Understanding COINS
2. A Big Part of COINS was not Published
3. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data

UK Government commits to open up new spending data!

It’s exciting times right now for people in the UK interested in how public funds are being used. The new government has proposed to publish unprecedented amounts of spending data in unprecedented detail. In the new Coalition Programme for Government (PDF), the PM has committed to the following, which is very similar to the Conservative pre-election promises but with more detail and — crucially — a schedule!

• Historic COINS spending data to be published online in June 2010.
• All new central government ICT (information and communication technologies) contracts to be published online from July 2010.
• All new central government lender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge.
• New items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010.
• All new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011.
• Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.

Local government spending transparency

• New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011.
• New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011.

Other key government datasets

• Crime data to be published at a level that allows the public to see what is happening on their streets from January 2011.
• Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants with salaries above £150,000 to be published in June 2010.
• Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants and NDPB officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale to be published from September 2010.
• Organograms for central government departments and agencies that include all staff positions to be published in a common format from October 2010.

This is all great news for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go? project. In particular we have been researching the COINS database as a rich source of data to visualise. In addition, it is noted that the current standard for reporting central government spending(PDF) is items above £20m in any year by region, so the £25,000 standard seems like a big improvement, hopefully this will also be spending by region.

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2. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
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In The Beginning There Were Mystery Boxes

JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost gave a great talk at TED 2007 themed around “Mystery Boxes”. A Mystery Box is a box of unspecified goods. When you buy a Mystery Box - from a magic shop, as Abrams describes doing with his grandfather as a child, or from a pet store, sweet shop, or wherever - you don’t know what’s going to be in it, you can only guess.

Abrams says Lost and other TV shows are littered with mystery boxes, not literally, but in the sense that the plot and characters within them are like mystery boxes: you don’t know what they are about until the end. The strength of the show is the big tease about what might be in the boxes:

So there’s this thing with mystery boxes that I started feeling, like, compelled. Then there’s the thing of, like, mystery in terms of imagination — the withholding of information. You know, doing that intentionally is much more engaging.

If you like the idea of magical mystery boxes then you’re going to like this.

I’ve been looking at where our tax money is spent. That might sound completely unrelated to popular TV shows, but this research has been all about the tease of what might be in the mystery boxes of the British Government’s spending records. In this post, I’m going to share the questions I’ve asked about the Government’s mystery boxes, and the replies I’ve got (as well as the ones I haven’t).

I’d appreciate help and advice on every line of enquiry I mention here.

This is the rough picture of public spending databases I’ve gathered so far, as part of my work as a researcher at ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ (click on the image to see the full picture).

On the left, you’ll see that our taxes go in to HMRC, then travel through the Treasury (HMT), on their way to Central Government departments, from where they fan out into various spending bodies, including communities and local government. What I’m interested in is tracing records of spending as they pass from one department to another.

Now I’ll list my investigations and findings for each department I’ve looked into.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)

I want to know how our tax records are stored, but so far I’ve only got this very very sketchy description (in response to one of many requests I’ve made under FOI). That reply does give some good clues about how National Insurance tax is stored in the statement:

For example the collection of National Insurance is supported by the National Insurance and PAYE system (NPS). This is a substantial build on what was previously known as the National Insurance Recording system (NIRS) to add on the PAYE business processes given the close interaction between the collection of PAYE tax and national Insurance. It has its own underlying database with customer information, but links to other databases within HMRC and in DWP to ensure that customer data is treated consistently throughout both departments.

Another thing we know about how our tax records are stored is that most of HMRC is outsourced and the contract for this outsourcing is not public yet. We know the contract is called ‘the Aspire contract’, and we have some background reading to do on it.

HM Treasury (HMT)

There is a project within the Treasury called ‘The Whole of Government Accounts‘, which aims to:

“consolidate the accounts of about 1300 bodies from within the central government, health service, local government and public corporation sectors.”

A database called the Combined Online INformation System (COINS) was developed to make this consolidation of accounts possible or easier or both. The Whole of Government Accounts has yet to report its work.

When I first started looking at the COINS system, very little had been made public about how detailed the spending records are. We’ve now got a pretty good understanding of the data in COINS as a result of our ‘where does my money go?‘ research.

We are now working to get:

A sample of complete COINS entries. The costs associated with the spending codes.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS)

I know of two databases that store spending data in the ONS:

• The CSDB (central shared database) does not use an ORACLE database. I’m in the process of finding out more details about the CSDB.
• The CORD system (Centralised ONS Repository of Data) used for some parts of the annual production process in ELS does use an ORACLE database. I have the schema for this one.

As well as these two databases, I’ve been told the ONS gets a copy of the COINS data for it’s reports and I’ve had a request for the COINS data sent to the ONS rejected.

Other Departmental Accounts

Contacts at HMT have let me know that each government department has its own record of accounts. I’ve been investigating how the Department for Work and Pensions store their accounts, and my next step is to request the data.

Local Spending

I’ve also got the schema for the Oracle database Cambridge County Council use to store their accounts. The next step is to ask for the data or a sample of it.

These are my mystery boxes. Hopefully, by now, you’re as curious to know what’s inside them as I am.

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Related posts:

1. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
2. COINS: A Users Guide
3. Understanding COINS

Putting the cuts into context: where is that £6 billion going to come from?

With the UK election over, reductions in public spending are currently at the top of the agenda. Whichever way you cut it, taxpayers and public service users look set to face big changes. The ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ dashboard - a free, interactive online tool from the Open Knowledge Foundation - will help to make sense of the £6 billion of spending cuts to be announced on Monday.

The project allows the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past 6 years, in an intuitive way using maps, timelines and graphs. The latest release includes:

• A new mini-app called ‘Where are the cuts?‘ which will capture and visualise spending cuts as they happen.
• A new dashboard for visualising and exploring spending by region, type or over time - breaking down the jargon to make it easier to understand official spending categories.
• A new Where Does My Money Go? data store. This houses all the cleaned-up, nicely formatted data, sourced from many different government departments, and makes it available both via the web and and an API, enabling others to reuse, investigate and re-present the data.

In addition to new information about the spending cuts, the Where Does My Money Go? project plans to represent detailed information from the COINS database, the ‘holy grail’ of spending data, which George Osborne committed to publishing shortly after this election.

Dr Rufus Pollock, Economist from the University of Cambridge and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, comments:

It is crucial that the public are able to understand how they will be affected by the cuts to be announced on Monday - which depends on having a ‘bigger picture’ of where spending currently goes. We will be working hard to show the implications of spending cuts as they are announced and to track speculation about where cuts will be made in the future. Our project aims to close the loop between public information on spending and the public.

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1. Emergency Budget, Deficit and Cuts: Visualized
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The COINS database — what we know and how we know it

The following post is from Lisa Evans, who is doing research on UK public finance data sources as part of our Where Does My Money Go? project.

Freedom of information: sharing our experiences

I’ve been reading some debate on the extent to which Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are a drain on public resources. A frequently cited example is the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Phil Wallis MP describes how this CRU consisted of 3 scientists who were not used to getting the number of FOI requests they were getting:

“[the FOI requests] were coming in by the day at one particular time, so you can understand [the CRU's] frustration”.

This leads to questions about the FOI law being used sensibly. This motivated me to share my experience of the FOI law: why it was necessary for me to request large chunks of government data, but also the effort that went into making the requests specific and useful.

The lifecycle of UK public funds

I’m doing research for the ‘Where Does My Money Go’ (WDMMG) project. The aim of the project is to visualise government spending through the ‘lifecycle’: from when money enters the system as tax to when it leaves as services etc.

As a team, one of the first places we looked for data detailing this ‘lifecycle’ was on HM Treasury website. There we found a couple of reports - the Country and Regional Analysis and the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis - that told us, for example, the parts of the country that benefit from various public services.

These reports also gave the details of suitable contacts in HM Treasury, so after spending some time understanding the data and coming up with some sensible questions, I contacted them and they invited me to meet them a few days latter.

At this meeting I demonstrated our WDMMG prototype and talked about the goals of the project. The Treasury team explained a system called the Combined Online Information System or COINS (which we blogged about in February), which stores the two reports we were interested in and, in addition to this, even more detailed data about public spending . The Treasury team told me that COINS uses a database called Camelot. The photo on their website speaks volumes:

Obstacles to getting the data

I had heard of COINS before, for example I knew that some people had requested the whole database, including the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum, who has been usefully documenting the appeal process he has been through for the COINS data.

Using the information from the meeting, the WDMMG research team dug a little deeper and found details of the contract between HM Treasury and Descisys (the COINS supplier). The details of the contract indicate the COINS system cost around £500,000 — which is relatively inexpensive.

Even though COINS was a relatively inexpensive piece of software, and so, one might assume, that it’s not too complex, it was clear at the time that finding out more about it would involve dealing with other complexity such as: a) the sensitive data it stores (such as information about military defense spending) and b) the intellectual property agreement with Descisys.

As such, it was obvious that knowing more about the structure of the database would be helpful, as it would allow us to be specific about the data we need. The first thing I did was requested the COINS schema, what I got was the data fields with no description of what they mean, but it was a start!

The second thing I did, to understand the Intellectual Property Agreement HM Treasury had entered into with Descisys, was request a copy of the COINS contract. Here are the intellectual property rights from page 41 of the document.

The third thing I did was to request the COINS training materials to determine what reports are available and to get descriptions of the data fields we had.

Meeting people is helpful

Then the WDMMG team met our contacts at HM Treasury again, to talk through the COINS data structure.

As a result of these FOI requests and meetings the research team have been able to make very specific requests for fields of data, as seen in this request for the spending codes known as Programme Object Groups (POG). We’ve also been able to identify spending codes that offer greater detail that was previously public.

From this experience you can see that meeting and explaining the project with HM Treasury has been our first priority and in return they have often given more help and information than requested. But, despite being helpful HM Treasury have entered into an agreement that means they are restricted in what they can reveal.

Lessons for the future?

Based on the last few weeks of research, my recommendations for people doing similar work would be:

• try to understand the system that interests you, by asking the people who use it.
• define as clearly as possible the data sets that are going to be useful to you.
• to get a reply in a defined time frame, quote the appropriate FOI law in your request for the data. I would recommend using What Do They Know for this.

But sadly it will often be the case that government departments will have Intellectual Property Agreements that make asking for data much more complex that it really should be.

Links

1. Phil Wallis MP on the Today Programme
2. The Country and Regional Analysis and the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis.
3. You can see the range of data types stored in COINS in our main WDMMG CKAN package.

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Related posts:

1. The Hunt For COINS
2. Understanding COINS
3. COINS: A Users Guide

The Hunt For COINS

The following post is from Lisa Evans, who is doing research on UK public finance data sources as part of our Where Does My Money Go? project.

I’ve been investigating data for use in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go? project. One of the first reports we looked at was the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) — the visualisation of PESA looks like this:

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

So an obvious question is where does the data in the PESA report come from and where is the PESA data stored?

The answer is that HM Treasury uses a database called the Combined Online Information System (COINS) to store PESA data, and not just PESA and the closely related Public Expenditure Outturn White Paper, it also stores data on new spending policy for the Spending Review, The Budget, Pre Budget Report, Supply Estimates and Supplementary Budget Information. I discovered this when I met some people from the Treasury two weeks ago, it also agrees with documents that the BBC journalist, Martin Rosenbaum, has kindly shared with us.

So clearly COINS is a useful database to understand for ‘Where Does My Money Go’, as we would like to be more familiar with all of the reports stored in COINS.

Here’s what I’ve discovered about COINS through Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests and meetings:

• COINS is a Multi-Dimensional Database according to this request I made for the COINS schema. The dimensions, described in the same FOI request, are:
  • Version: used to list details of different data streams, ’snapshots’, and so on;
  • Organisation: used to record details of organisations;
  • Variables: lists the standard chart of accounts, with associated ‘tags’ or ‘fields’ used to specify budgetary treatment, nature of expenditure, and so on;
  • Reporting: groups ‘adjustment types’ by status levels and data streams for reporting purposes;
  • Time: lists the time frames for data - years, and months within year, and identifies the current ‘focal years’ for each data stream;
  • CPID: Counter party identifiers, another list of organisations;
  • Segment: contains Programme Objects (PO) and other structural type information to identify budget treatment and so on;
  • Analysis: essentially a “spare” dimension;
• The COINS field headings are public, they’re presented in the house of commons library and in this Freedom of Information Request for the COINS fields broken down by dimensions.
• HM Treasury has a contract with Descisys relating to COINS. The Treasury’s relationship with Descisys goes back almost 10 years. HM Treasury’s relationship with the British based subsidiary of Descisys, called Information Edge, has been in place for over 5 years. I gained this background from an FOI request for the contact between Information Edge and HM Treasury; the request failed as the contract is with Descisys.
• From the meeting at the Treasury we know that each government department defines their own Programme Object Groups and Programme Objects, these appear to be the most detailed descriptions of the departmental spending in the database.
• That COINS doesn’t store any national income data, that comes from HM Revenue and Customs the people at the Treasury told me.

I have made some FOI requests that are yet to be answered:

• The field descriptions of the multi-dimensional database.
• The contract with Descisys.
• A copy of the intellectual property rights vested with Descisys.
• The Programme Objects in COINS: this seems to be the most detailed information each government department stores in COINS.
• The training materials for COINS given to new employees to HM Treasury.
• A description of the type of confidential information stored in COINS.
• The different levels of user permission in COINS.

If you would like to join the hunt for more information about COINS that please get in touch — drop an email to us at wdmmg at okfn dot org.

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Related posts:

1. The COINS database — what we know and how we know it
2. Understanding COINS
3. COINS: A Users Guide

Discovering Where My Money Goes I: PESA

This is the first of a series of post looking at the data challenges for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go project, for which I’m helping to gather and analyze data.

I got involved in the project because I wanted to know how much money the Department of Energy spends on different energy sources, to whom this money went and how this has changed over time.

However, I quickly discovered that answering questions like these, at least in the first instance, is difficult. A simple search on the web won’t magically turn up your data and once you start digging deeper — for example by looking around departmental websites — it is hard to know where to look and what all the different categories of spending are and what the accounting terms mean or even to know if the data you are looking for exists!

Given this, it is natural to start higher ‘up the tree’ when exploring “where your money goes”. Starting at, or the near, the top we can then drill down, with one level of data (we hope) leading to the next. Moreover, this is probably the approach that makes it easiest for the average citizen to get into the data — and for building the visualizations to help present this sort of complex information in an easy-to-understand way.

So where does one begin? What is the spending at the very top level? The simple answer to these questions for the UK is:

Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA)

Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) is the highest level breakdown of Government spending (both past and planned) and is what is underpins the UK Budget. It provides both department breakdowns (key for financial planning) as well as detailing spending using a standard classifications of functions of government (COFOG) which provides comparability across EU countries. Some, though not all of these, are then broken down by time and by region. For example:

• Table 5.1 shows government department spending broken down by COFOG function. The rest of the tables in section five are COFOG functions by time.

• Table 7.2 is government department broken down into basic spending categories and given over time, that is the last six years.

• Table 9.16 is, like table 5.1, broken down by COFOG function, but this time, instead of government department the spending by function is split into geographical region of the UK.

But why not have a look yourself! To facilitate collaboration on analysis, assisted by some more volunteers, we uploaded the whole of PESA to Google Docs, also creating a PESA Summary listing all the tables (with links), details of their contents and a rating for how “interesting”. All the spreadsheets have been shared to make it easy for people to dive straight in and help out.

Unfortunately PESA, goes only so far. In particular it provides very limited drill-down with spending only broken down to departmental or high-level functions. To go beyond this we need to find other sources of data. This will form the subject of my next post.

If you would like to help with this project — we do have lots of interesting data to work with! — then please leave a comment or get in touch with me directly at lisa [dot] evans [at] okfn [dot] org.

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2. First mockups for “Where Does My Money Go?”
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