Add Your Comments on the Prototype Here!
Comments can be anything from a suggestion for an improvement to an observation of an interesting fact.
NB: due to the wealth of feedback, we’ve pulled together some of the main suggestions for improvements on a separate ideas page.
P.S.: we’re aware this comments system isn’t perfect and we’re looking to improve it but we need help!
An
December 10th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
In the bubble-chart overview changing from year to year should change the size of the main bubble to reflect change in spending (at the moment it is always normalized to the same size for each year).
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Bob Wallum Reply:
December 17th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Then should that be actual expenditure or inflation adjusted real expenditure? maybe a button for both?
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December 11th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Fantastic site! But, just one question: I could see no bubble for debt payments? Surely a percentage of the annual budget goes to pay off existing bond debt?
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Glad you liked it. Debt payments are in there but not at the top level! If you look into the “General Public Services” item you’ll see a sub-item for “Public Debt Transactions” (£31b n) of which the majority is “Central government debt interest” (£30bn) with the remainder being “Local government debt interest” (£627m) and “Public corporation debt interest” (£437m).
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William Waites Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Should there not also be a category for provincial (for lack of a better word, what is the proper collective name? “devolved regions” doesn’t trip off the tongue properly) debt? I’m sure Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland have debt to service, is this just rolled into central government debt?
Probably a fault in the data owing to complicated historical political arrangements…
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Mark Cooper Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Hi Matt,
Debt interest is £36 Billion pa
Phew! So this is Prudence?
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Josh W Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I know! Bear in mind though that this doesn’t include income from investment, nor seperate out investment from continuous costs, so the whole “borrow to invest” golden rule thing is invisible.
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December 11th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Great, i like it! I find the type of visualisation with these bubbles quite useful. What surprises me is that it wasn’t clear enough to show the ‘bailout’ billions (see question above). Although a little bubble somewhere could have indicated a significant growth in the animated view. That is actually the benefit of this type of visualisation. Would it make sense to make the view more granular/have more bubbles?
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
The structure of the breakdown in the prototype is derived directly from that the government use in PESA (see the data page for more details). You’re quite right that other approaches might be better (e.g. one in which the bailout was more prominent!).
Re. more granularity: agree completely and it’s our number one priority for future work. The main challenge here is getting the data …
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December 11th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Great site. It would be good to see where the money comes from added. e.g. Government spending accounts for something like 35% of South East GDP, but over 60% of Northern Ireland and Wales. Therefore can you add tax proceeds per head to the spend per head that is available?
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December 11th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Nice to be able to see this data. Would be good if we could get an HTML version that does not use flash. Or even better and API into this data in both XML and JSON so we can build our own graphs of this data and even republish this data by using an API to access the latest numbers.
Good to see the numbers on the web. Well done.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
By HTML version I assume you mean javascript (how else would you get interactivity?). If so, we understand where you are coming from, but at the moment there is nothing in javascript comparable to what’s available in Flash for doing this kind of work (we have done some javascript work but that’s another story …).
Regarding data, we’ve put everything we’ve got in Google docs spreadsheet — see the data page which has a reasonable API. Of course we’d like (and intend) to do more, including developing a proper data store with APIs but we need help to do this whether in the form of funding or volunteer contributors. If you’re interested in doing either please head over to the get involved page.
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Ed Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 4:57 am
It’s certainly possible to make a site like this with Javascript, and it would be more accessible too. Probably not as easy though, but there’s plenty of javascript charting libraries out there – and using canvas/excanvas is a realisic option.
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tgp Reply:
December 18th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Using canvas/excanvas is a realistic option but claims that this would make the page more accessible are shaky. In terms of pure percentages there’s not a great deal of difference between the number flash users and canvas/excanvas users and when you take into account the extra bandwidth and processor performance equivalent content in Javascript the question of which content is more accessible becomes more blurred.
Further, for complex visualisations and interactivity Flash can offer more structured keyboard access (though I note wheredoesmymoneygo does a poor job of offering keyboard based navigation)
December 11th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Perhaps you could contact the appropriate persons at Labor, Conservative and Lib Dem and ask for projects on the next 5 years given they were in power. I would finally be able to make an educated decision with my vote rather than pick the based on the color of my t-shirt I’m wearing that day.
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Lisa Evans Reply:
May 5th, 2010 at 9:28 am
This is an excellent application of this project and something that would work very well with the data gathered over at democracy club
Another project we are working on is to crowd source the spending cuts: where are the cuts
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December 11th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Very good: could you tie in the emissions/energy budget to this?
Rgds
Damon
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
By emissions/energy budget do you mean spending in these areas or output (e.g. KwH, tonnes of CO2)? In either case do you have any suggestions on where we might find relevant data (that’s usually the hardest part!)
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Lisa Evans Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
We have data store for exactly this type of information here:
http://www.ckan.net/group/energy-data
That would be the place to add emissions/energy budget.
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December 11th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
A minor quibble: on the main view, the slider for the year only displays stuff once it’s released. If it changed stuff dynamically as it would slide, it would be much easier to see changes over time…
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Good point George. We’ll look into whether anything can easily be done about that.
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Ed Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 4:51 am
Seconded, came here to point out this minor annoyance.
Also, some long labels on bubbles obscure the bubble so much that you can’t see it. They also have a tendency to hit eachother.
Also, can we see the overview in terms of % of GDP etc?
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December 11th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Excellent visualisation. Whatever bubble paid for this was money well spent for once.
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December 11th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Congratulations – did you have to ask ‘000 of Freedom of Information questions to get the source data ?
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lisa Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Thank you Alex — fortunately the Treasury make these particular accounts public, so no FOI requests were required. The data page: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/data/ has more details about the accounts we used.
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December 11th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Is this Flex, and are those bubble graphs your own creation? Great reporting – really like it.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Yes this is Flex. The visualization work was done by the amazing people at iconomical who have been working with us on this project.
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December 11th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Wow – thank you for doing this work. It is so valuable to clearly see how the public’s money is being spent.
Will you be releasing a screen showing sources of income and a ‘balance sheet’ showing assets and liabilities?
Thank you again,
James
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
James: really glad to hear you liked it. Looking at income as well as expenditure is one of the items at the top of our list of “next things to do”. How fast we proceed with these “next things” depends on how much help we can get.
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December 11th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
zoom in on a detail
click ‘Overview’
Expected: zoom out to overview.
Actual: no change to the view.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Hmmm, see what you mean. You can still get back to “top level” by clicking back out on total figures but you’re right it would be quicker (and more natural) just to click on overview.
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December 11th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
This is fantastic i am very much impressed. I do find it difficult to look at the information with the text being too big i would prefer it if the bubbles were blank but as you move your mouse over it the title of the bubble and the information is shown. This is most evident in the public order and safety one. I would only want to see the text when i take a closer look meaning when i click on a area.
I still think that this website is great and it can only get better and more comprehensive please keep me posted every step of the way.
Thanks Andrew Freeman
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Andrew: thanks for the feedback. You’re right that the text, particularly on small screens, can make things difficult to read. We’ll definitely be looking into this at the next stage.
We also think that quite a bit of work needs to be done to “dejargonize” the titles (which come directly from original government data). If you, or anyone else, have ideas on this score please let us know.
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andrew freeman Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
what are your future plans for this website?
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Andrew: we’ve got lots of ideas for what we’d like to do next such as (feel free suggest more!):
1. Improve the existing prototype in a variety of ways most notably by dejargonizing the data, improving the transition between different “views”, and removing some of the sharp edges in the interface mentioned by yourself and others.
2. Get (lots) more data. There’s almost a limitless amount of work to be done here — eventually we’d like to have spending information down to the very lowest project and geographic level — but to start with we’re thinking of:
– » The departmental spending breakdowns in the “supplementary budget information” documents (all pdf unfortunately)
– » Data on government (tax) revenue (this has been suggested several times here already!)
BTW: this is an area where we’d particularly welcome participation from the community!
3. Develop other, even simpler, “ways into” the data. We really want to present this information in a way that is easy for everyone to use and understand (At the moment we think we’re still a way from that at the moment)
4. Have a proper backend data store so that others can easily access and reuse this data. We don’t want to be the only ones using and visualizing the material we collect.
5. Allow for users of the tool to share easily their comments and discoveries. Something like an integrated annotation system would be great.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Nice site, and a step in the right direction in terms of enabling people to see where public money really gets spent (rather than what the media might flag up as the ‘latest spending revelation’). One thing that you might want to think about – on the trend graphs having a steeply increasing base section to the graph means that the total ’slice’ goes up steeply – and this may leave some people with the impression that spend in all areas has increased. An example can be seen in national / environmental protection / trends, where the ’slice’ gets thicker as you move through time but this is largely driven by the big increase in waste management costs, with other areas of environmental protection spend being much more consistent over time.
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Lisa Evans Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
In the next version of Where Does My Money Go, we plan to have commenting on every page — so you can add well observed notes like this.
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December 12th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Nice idea, interface feels quite clunky. Drilling down doesn’t transition and would be better as ‘zoom’, date slider only changes on mouseup etc.
Lots of potential, needs some refinement.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Dan: thanks for the suggestions — all duly noted.
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December 12th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Great site & project! I never realised we spent more on pensions than education. Also interesting to compare spending over the years as %age of GDP – almost quantifies the higher real spending.
Some suggestions: - A key for some features? (e.g. What is n.e.c.? How are the “real” figures calculated?) - Also an explanation of each bubble / section for those unversed in Governmental-speak. - A simple comparison with other countries (e.g. France, Denmark, US etc)? - A link to income (Where does it come from?) so that deficit / debt can be visualised. - Some of the hover text is temperamental in appearing, typically for some bubbles with overlaid text.
Look forward to the full-version. There is a real necessity for these tools in an age of political sleight-of-hand and sloppy journalism.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Ben: glad you like it and thanks for all the suggestions. Dejargonization is a top priority though we need to find a nice way to integrate it cleanly (it would be great to allow users to add annotations!).
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Rupert West Reply:
April 9th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
An excellent and well-conceived project.
This might be slightly optimistic from a data perspective, but how about adding information on efficiency within each area. This is of course both very difficult to quantify and probably very contentious no matter how carefully it’s done, but it could be a great tool for accountability.
Essentially the problem is how to quantify deliverables across such diverse programmes which by their nature are rich with externalities…but, some thoughts:
For project focused items: performance relative to initially stated budgets / targets (on the granular / project by project level and then aggregated to the wider cost line); in cost terms and in time-to-launch terms;
For ongoing service style items: headcount as a ratio of budget; ratios of staff type (i.e. front line staff, front line support, management, admin etc)
Imagine if we could quickly see that a certain department was repeatedly coming in at 20% over budget, or that one department was running with 15% admin staff where another had only 4%. At the very least pointed questions could then be directed at the appropriate places.
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December 12th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
It would also be helpful to see “where does my money come from?”
So, how much are income tax revenues, VAT, corporation tax, NI, council tax, landfill tax etc. etc. etc.? As these taxes fall on different groups, having both sets of data will make it possible to see who is paying for what. Are businesses contributing most to the NHS or is it income tax payers?
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
TNKH: you’re absolutely right. As I said in my response to James above, looking at income as well as expenditure is one of the items at the top of our list of “next things to do”. If you have suggestions for good places to dig up the relevant data please let us know using the form on the data page.
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December 13th, 2009 at 4:55 am
Bug:
Go to Long Term Trends Untick any checkbox at the top Notice that relevant series disapears from the chart Go back to Overview Go back to Long Term Trends Notice that the checkbox is still unticked but the series is visible
Showing the tickboxes on the Overview screen makes little sense, and it isn’t clear they’re disabled (as they’re all disabled and don’t use the OS style, so the user can’t tell).
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 15th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Ed: Thanks for the bug finding and we’ll look into fixing this.
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December 14th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Nice. Have seen the original of this from DCLG I think? Would be good if you toggle the units to % of total and £ per person/capita in the UK and national overviews. Even maybe switch from per capita (this is total population as denominator?) to per taxpayer (use Labour force statistics for an estimate). Being able to visualise the total burden/contribution by the average working taxpayer would be good.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 15th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Gavin J: like idea of ‘normalizing’ data in different ways and we’ll add to the list of suggested improvements (only concern here is not to overload user with options).
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December 14th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Cracking Site Grommit!
The Balance Sheet, P&L and Source & Application of funds idea is excellent. A way to treat the finances of UK plc as a business, so we can apply all the ratios and performance measures that firms use will help highlight any inefficiencies .. if there are any (!)
HM Treasury have a database called “COINS” (I think) – it may be worth trying to get access to that too in the new age of opening OUR data the government create.
Also, have you contacted the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as they provide funding for democratic projects like this and MySociety.org – every little helps as “they” say.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 15th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Andrew: glad you like it. We’ve heard of “COINS” but so far not managed to track it down. If anyone has ideas for how to get hold of it please say — or perhaps it’s time for another FOIA request!
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December 15th, 2009 at 2:53 am
An incredible educative tool. Excellent work. Is there a chance this prototype will be editable? I would love to see this done for Germany. All Data is easily accessible. What a fantastic way to visualize the way money is spent.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 15th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Phil: we’d love to expand this to other jurisdictions such as Germany. If you have (or know how to get) access to the relevant data please get in touch and we can chat about how we could collaborate on doing this.
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December 15th, 2009 at 4:54 am
Fantastic information graphicks. I wish to have something similar for spanish statistics from 1990 to now, to see in a very well done visual way how to show facts and numbers. Congratulations
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 15th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Miguel: we’d love to see similar work being done for other jurisdictions (it would be particularly good to compare different countries). If you have ideas how we could do this for e.g. Spain please get in touch.
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December 15th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Hi, I couldn’t find money destined to new energies (eolic, solar etc…). Where it is?
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lisa Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Hi John, energy spending is covered in Economic Affairs and is under the heading of Fuel and Energy — it is £909 Mn.
I have made a number of Freedom of Information requests for more detail on the spending on new energies. You can see my requests here: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/lisa_evans
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December 15th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
so much money on health care and so little on environment protection… is that hard to understand that these two are related? health quality grows in greener and nicer environments… but we seem to prefer to put money on medical patches instead.
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December 17th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Great site, very interesting and clear!
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December 17th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Great side – couple of suggestions: 1) Graphs need scales on the y-axis: are we talking million, billions or trillions? 2) Explanation of abbreviations: R&D, n.e.c. are the two obvious ones. 3) On the National page, Overview of England for Economic Affairs, I’m losing some bubbles off the screen. I’m using Opera 9.63 at 1064 x 768. Best, Steve
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Stephen: Thanks for the feedback.
1) Agreed and noted! 2) Agreed and noted. Two issues here: a) getting good concise explanations b) integrating this into the app in a useful for not too intrusive way 3) It’s been hard to get the app to layout well on all screens and browsers so thanks for the feedback. This is one of those things that is oh so much harder when done in an interactive web app than when done in something static …
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December 17th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Fabulous!
Would be even more meaningful with further explanation of the meanings assigned of each circle. Maybe when you click on the circle to zoom into an area of expenditure it should include the definitions there. It could also include links to the various government departments and/or documents giving further details of the expenditure.
It would be a nice feature if you could input your income and it showed you what proportion of that spending is accessible by you. Region selection would also be required I suspect. I earned a good salary so pretty much everything under social protection is ‘not available’ to me. I believe personalised view would be a welcome addition.
Overlaying demographic information would reveal interesting facts that are currently extremely difficult to expose at a guess. The expenditure show is the input to the system if you like. It would be good to visualise the outputs by demographic.
Great work one and all!
Regards Simon
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 19th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Simon: all great suggestions. Better documentation/annotation plus personalization (really making this where does my money go) are definitely going to be top priorities for next steps.
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December 17th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Firstly congratulations on a great idea and something that potentially goes an extremely long way to aiding the democratic process, begining to provide an easy to use format for analysing our governmental spending.
I have to agree with the comments encouraging a finer granularity to the data. For example to break down the medical services into subcatagories.
This is a fantastic overview, and certainly promts a great deal of questions, finer granularity would answer many of the obvious questions. E.g a suprisingly large circle, promots the question, why is this circle so big, this can only be answered by being able to drill down and see the components that make up the circle.
This must be where the vast majority of all the time/effort is spent by your team.
Out of interest, is it access to the requisit data or time/effort that is the bar to finer granularity?
Again congratulations on a great idea.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 20th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Finer granularity of data is one of our top priorities (see my response to andrew freeman above — plus the new ideas page).
For us probably the biggest challenge is getting access (locating and getting) the data. Though even when you have it there is a lot of work to clean and integrate it especially if it is in ‘bad’ form (e.g. PDFs). We’re definitely looking for help here so if you have ideas where we could find relevant data or want to dig in yourself take a look at the data page …
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December 17th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I like this but hiding debt interest repayment under ‘general public services’ seems wrong. To me ‘general public services’ sounds like a good thing. Debt interest repayment is clearly not.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 20th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
The structure of the bubble-chart breakdown comes straight from the Government’s classifications which themselves follow an international standard called “Classifications of Functions of Government” (COFOG) so while this may not seem right I don’t think there is any intentional hiding here
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December 17th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Really impressive site. There’s a lot of scope for good visualisation tools like this to get people better informed.
A few specific points. 1) Regional category data shows UK and outside UK for total spend, but not for per capita. Any reason? Also, some of the allocations are odd. You allocate international services to the regions on a per capita basis, but not debt service. Defence comes out as either £1 or £2 per capita, depending on region. I would expect either an equal allocation (everyone benefits equally) or more variation (based on location of bases, etc.)
2) The circle arrangement is intuitively off for me. Having the last level continue out radially rather than wrapping it around the larger circle makes it look like there are more levels of sub-category.
Those are minor points. Overall, this is really cool.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 20th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
1) Not having per-capita for UK and outside UK is an omission driven by PESA as is the second item you bring up. As for defence as you will see the spending is entirely allocated to the UK and so I wouldn’t rely on any regional breakdown here (this lack of breakdown may well be for “national security” reasons.
2) Noted!
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December 17th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Yea as i suspected.
Great start for more transparancy. But a far way away from actually knowing where the money goes.
Sure £200 billion for social protection, but where does all the money go ?
I want to know how many second generation immigrants are getting free houses while i am being taxed to hell and back. Paying £650 for a basic 1 bed flat without bills. While they get free houses.
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lisa Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Hi Paul, there is more detail on the spending for Social Protection. The largest portion of spending in that area is £87bn to support people in old age.
You are absolutely right about how useful data on government (tax) revenue would be to this project. This is an area where we’d particularly welcome volunteer participation.
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December 17th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Why are there two “family benefits, income support and tax benefits” under social protection?
One is £18b and the other is £20b. One is listed under a dot called Social exclusion n.e.c. Do you know what the difference is between the two types of “family benefits, income support and tax benefits”?
Do you have any idea what exactly R&D Economic Affairs is at £3b ?
What about the £5b for General economic, commerical and labour affairs, any idea what exactly this entails ?
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December 17th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
This is a great idea. Thanks.
One question. One huge outlay from our taxes are the £115m per week being handed over to the EU. (I am not sure whether this figure was before or after Blair agreed to give up the £5 billion rebate we used to have re CAP). I cannot find this under any of the headings. Where is it included?
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December 17th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
This is fantastic. Thank you all for your hard work.
Please dont fit much extra onto the main graphs – the relative simplicity is worth so much in terms of impact it would be better to have extra pages than clutter.
Is it me, or does it not add up? The first tier circles dont seem to sum to the number in the bubble in the middle.
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December 17th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
i agree with Andrew the sear simplicty of the bubbles need to stay.
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December 18th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Hi… Loved the graphics and the bubbles. I just find it hard to compare circle area ratios in a direct way. A possibility for presenting the data which I have seen elsewhere (and therefore take no credit for the idea) is to present it as a square/rectangle for the total spend, with the relevent subsections as squares/recrtangles within it. Its easier to compare and contrast areas with straight edges rather than curved and could potentially open up the data to a larger audience.
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December 19th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
i noticed this whilst on the bbc/news website and thought about this straight away. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2009/crash/8414354.stm
i feel it could assist in a good way with the total spending of a certain area for example education the bubble could stay the same however once you click onto the education bubble this could be used with all the sections within the education spending could indeed surround the bubble and instead of the % marks being used £ could replace it. Also i feel yuo could go deeper as once you can see the spending of lets say secondary education you could click on that bar and a comprehnsive list of data can then be viewed covering all the funding. although this all depends on the information, time and staffing avaliable to do all this (if any of this makes no sense simply click on the link above and i hope things come clearer)
Thanks Andy
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December 21st, 2009 at 10:21 am
The site is fantastic in terms of the information available. Very interesting. It could benefit massively from some user experience work, but on the whole very good.
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December 21st, 2009 at 11:44 pm
i have just been sent this from a friend and i’m rather confused. http://www.graphicoutlines.com/wordpress/2009/06/07/government-spending/
then click on “The definitive atlas of UK government spending” link below the picture.
This link shows a picture of the 2007-08 budget as designed by you, it has been sorted into Government departments with a slight breakdown. Am i right in saying that this is something you are trying to re-create on the website along with the further broken down areas of the departments, regions and local authorities spending?
The reason why i am asking this is because it seems many of the discussions made have been about the way the information is illustrated and this seems to work pefectly fine in my opinion unless the difficulty is applying the fixed data to an interactive map then in that case i fully understand and wish i could help.
Thanks Andy
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:52 am
Andy: the image on the page you’ve linked to is actually done by the Guardian and not by us
What we’re aiming to here, ultimately, is to get the most detailed breakdown (to the lowest possible level) of government spending and present it in a comprehensive and accessible way so you can really see exactly “where your money goes”.
The data in the prototype is at a relatively high level and one of the things we are actively looking to do is break it down further at the departmental, regional and local authority level. We’re also faced with the challenge of providing simple but comprehensive interfaces to this data so we can still see the “wood” despite all the “trees”.
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December 22nd, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Can we have a version number or updated dd-mm-yyyy at the top of the screen, so you know if something has changed when you go back in.
Cheers
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:45 am
greg: good idea, though I can tell that there haven’t been any updates of the data since release and we’re unlikely to update the data in the immediate future (next few weeks).
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December 23rd, 2009 at 11:45 am
greg: good idea, though I can tell that there haven’t been any updates of the data since release and we’re unlikely to update the data in the immediate future (next few weeks).
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December 27th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Great start, here’s a few random comments: 1. I’d prefer to see later versions rely less or not at all on Flash. Svg, maybe? Sorry, I’m being hardcore FOSS aren’t I..?! 2. Nice to have visual tooltips on the big bubbles, explore via mouseover and then click 3. I ‘expected’ to see breakdown bubbles when clicking on the big bubbles, but perhaps that’ll come with granularity, so comment is about maximally consistent interface. 4. Is the final proposed interface RESTful or something like?..that would be great for general ‘easy’ re-use and visualistion on other sites. 5. (much later) Fun to have a shadow citizen’s budget to vote ‘users’ spending. Wildly unscientific slacktivism though. More in a while, lots of holiday eating first, though.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
January 19th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Hugh: thanks for the comments. To answer some of them (1) We’ve had quite a lot of comments about Flash and I’ve put up an explanation of our choice on this here (2) + (3) Noted and added to the TODO list (4) Yes, plan is to have something like a RESTful interface (5) Like this idea
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January 11th, 2010 at 11:01 am
It would be helpful to explain somewhere just what is Social Protection. It’s typically for the government to hide controversial expenditures around seemingly harmless, or even useful terms, rather than telling it what it is. Does social protection mean national security, crime prevention, terrorism prevention, etc? Can we get this broken down as well? Also, it would be really useful to have this data and compare it to other nations such as Sweden on one end and the US on the other. This way we can see at which end of the spectrum between warmongering to social justice does UK really lie.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
January 19th, 2010 at 11:09 am
DSmith: Social Protection comes from this UN thing called COFOG (classifications of functions of government). We’ve started listing this out on our glossary section of the data summary spreadsheet linked from the data page.
On your second point, very much agree that comparison with other countries would be really useful. The main challenge here is getting decent comparable data. If you, or anyone else, know where we can source good data for other countries, especially in standardized e.g. COFOG’d form, please let us know using the form on the data page.
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January 21st, 2010 at 10:02 am
Great tool. I have a couple of suggestions:
1) Can the various categories be linked to departments? That might help the understanding of some of the more obscure terminology.
2) It would be great to have a version where you enter your tax bill (or have it calculated) and it gives a breakdown of the proportion of your ‘taxpayers money’ which goes to each area. Perhaps not an accurate representation, but something that helps to bring the numbers home.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
January 25th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Louise: thanks for the comments.
1) spending categories can be linked to departments though obviously not one-to-one. On the visualisations page there’s a visualization “we did earlier” which breaks down spending categories by department which could be useful on this score (see the “spending by function” one).
2) “Personalizing” the spending breakdown so this is where “my” money goes not “our” money goes is pretty much the number one ask and its one of our top priorities for stage 2.
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January 21st, 2010 at 11:17 am
This is a very beautiful site and simple and easy to understand well done
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January 21st, 2010 at 12:34 pm
I am so pleased to see this diagram again .. when I first saw it in the Guardian, I fell in love with it. So clear and informative .. exactly what visualisation should be. Edward Tufte would be chuffed. Let’s have more of the same!
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January 21st, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Fantastic, now maybe one for local councils!!
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
January 25th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Dominic: we’re really interested in getting more local data. The problem, at the moment, is that local data is both more limited and (unsurprisingly) less consistent than national data. One dataset on local government spending that is available and is quite good is the Local Spending Report.
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January 21st, 2010 at 2:49 pm
It is good to know were all the corrupt politions are wasting our money. A true insight as to how to blow cash on rubbish. Close the tunnel and get out of Europe, Bring back Whinston and get 2 Jags out. God help my son when he grows up if it is run by the current bunch of wasters.
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March 9th, 2010 at 1:22 am
Although the purpose of this site is to answer the question “Where does my money go?”, it just simply isn’t specific enough. Shouldn’t the government be accountable for how it spends OUR money?
It stems down to who has the power over spending? In a dictatorship, it is one man; in communism it is few men; in democracy it is still few men, with weak challenges from the people; but is there such a thing as people power, where a government actually must take responsibility?
This is an area of government failure: the failure [to pass] information. Why is there a need for secrets? They just encourage corruption. A solution would be to create simple, yet detailed reports [to educate people on a specific matter] so government decisions [not just on spending, but on any area] can be analysed by the PUBLIC and approved, adjusted or disproved.
Did we really want to invade Iraq? What were the real motives? Should Gordon Brown have sold all our gold? Do we want the Heathrow Expansion? Should we have bailed out the banks? Should we have borrowed so much money? It goes on, and our questions aren’t being answered and we don’t get a true choice. We get to pick who, and that’s it – pathetic. It should be taken to what, why, where, when, and how.
It may seem far fetched and a bit crazy, but technology could easily provide a solution. We wouldn’t just be accepting the choice, we would also be accepting the responsibility, therefore, no one would be to blame.
[Note that this idea would be like having discussions with the government, rather than there being no government at all]
Reply to this comment and tell me if there is a better way to improve accountability and reduce corruption in the government. :]
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March 9th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
i don’t know i you work with these or you have collected information with these but i found this website and thought it might be of some help.
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/index.php
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catherine taylor Reply:
March 29th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
I’d be enormously grateful if you or anyone coul dtellme where I oculd find info, not on total spend as the budget is usually presented but on: Of each pound collected in tax (so out of 100) how much goes to – Pensions,Health, education, defence,welfare,protection,transport,arts, general governement, etc.
Id just like to see what percdentis spsent on what. Ive asked this question for yearts and no one seems able to tell me.
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March 15th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
There has been some debate whether the unemployment figure is right at £5bn odd. What does it comprise?
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March 18th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
On the overview can there please be an option of viewing real and %GDP figures and scaling the view such that the largest year fills the screen but other years are in proportion (not arbitrarily scaled up to fill the screen)
On the trendview can clicking on a colour cause the graphs to change to displaying just the function related to the colour (with perhaps sub-functions too). If this is too hard then can clicking on a colour cause the related function to be the first/lowest set of bars. At the moment it is easy to see changes in ‘Social protection’ but hard for the other functions.
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March 19th, 2010 at 12:32 am
.. I
ve lived long enough to see true democracy at the finger tips of the common man..so heres a start on my wish list: Where our money goes in Europe? Global warming, how much Co2 each year is release, and by which country’s. A breakdown of all gasses ,from natural and man made, that causes warming.A chart to show what effect we are actual cutting these warming gasses, against natural emissions and man-made. Many thanks to you and your team
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March 26th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
I’ve found this information and thought of this website. I hope it helps if you haven’t studied this already.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/pespub_index.htm
click on: PESA 2009 and PEOWP 2008-09
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April 2nd, 2010 at 6:57 am
Well, further to the debt/borrowing requirement of £175 Bn which taxes as a share of GDP have risen to 52%. This makes us one of the highest taxed country in the western world. Despite this level of taxation, we expect pensioners to live on19% of average wage. Fuel poverty among this group is the worst in Europe, and the basic state pension is the worst in Europe, after 13 years of prudence and Browns golden rule that 40% should not be exceeded! Taxes are still rising though but expenditure needs to be curbed and taxes reduced. Conclusion: The UK economy has been and continues to be, mis-managed by what can only be described as incompetent career politicians without a sense of honour or duty!
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April 10th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Dear All
I make a research for MBA in finance to move to DPA at Westbrook , and my project is Impact of economic crisis on external funding sources in Egypt – Is the economic crisis in reducing the grants approved from abroad to Egypt
So, is there old and new data can be compared by??
I will appreciate your support.
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April 12th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Still don’t know what n.e.c means? Also not sure what “Executive and legistitive organs, financial and fiscal affairs and external affairs” do, but they get plenty of money to do so. In the regional spending, science and technology is a medium part of economic affairs, but seems to be missing from the main bubble.
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Rufus Pollock Reply:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
n.e.c. = not elsewhere classified (i.e. this is catch-all category).
According to COFOG glossary we have put together — see glossary worksheet in our data google doc linked from data:
Thanks for the pointer on the missing bubble.
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April 13th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
It may be because I cannot distinguish all of the numbers for the 10 elements of expenditure listed, but they appear to only add up to £595bn instead of £620bn. A better display would be good, so that the individual components of each element can be identified. Alternatively a tabular form of presenting the numbers would be useful.
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April 14th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Great diagram. It makes understanding the large sums much easier. When a political party promises to spend however much more on something, this diagram really allows you to see how much of a commitment this is, in the bigger picture of spending. It’s easy to understand and use, while at the same time elegant.
Good work!
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April 14th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
The headline figures on the overview bubbles are all rounded down. If the headline figures are taken from the long term trends page then the total for 2008/9 is £600.7bn, which is still £20bn short of the posted total of £620bn. The individual items for Social Protection come to a total of £196.7bn, some £7bn short of the posted total of 203.9bn. If this information is to be credible surely it must add up correctly. So, not only do the headline bubbles not add up to the overall total, the makeup of the headline bubbles doesn’t add up either. Is this a presentation problem in that perhaps not all bubbles are visible and accessible? A full screen version of the bubble diagram might make it easier to make everything visible – with a table of figures as an alternative. Or is there just a problem with the adding up? Transparency has to be credible to be believable, and to be believed has to be a prime objective of presenting this information.
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April 16th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Great job on the visualisation, I think it works really well. Bravo.
It would be kinda cool to be able to view in a tabular form to or maybe just export to a spreadsheet format so we can muck about with the data?
But overall an excellent site.
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April 26th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I was amazed to see how little aid we give to foreign countries, I thought it was a 100x more from the tabloids!
One question, though – where (if anywhere) are the costs of bailing out / insurance the banks over the last year or two accounted for?
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April 26th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
I continue to be amazed that all of the comments are about the detail, but nobody seems bothered that the numbers do not add up. A simple pie chart with the ten main categories would be a much clearer presentation, each with a drill down facility to another pie chart with the make up items. If each pie chart is as large as the screen permits, the presentation would be much clearer, and it would be easier to check the adding up. If the basic data could be in a simple one page spreadsheet, with ten main categories and up to say ten makeup items in each, how difficult can it be to get the sums right? Alternatively, is part of the reason we are in such a mess that there is a real shortage of people who can add up ten numbers?
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April 27th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Hi, First of all, this is probably the most useful political website since theyworkforyou.com. However, I can see one problem. There is no mention of the EU. If I can believe what I read in some newspapers, there should be a huge category with EU spending in it. Why can’t you add that in? It would be really useful to put europe in perspective, seeing as there is so much debate about it. Gareth
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Lisa Evans Reply:
April 28th, 2010 at 9:54 am
You’re quite right: EU spending isn’t allocated to functions in the report we use (functions are what we use for the primary breakdown e.g. ‘Health’, ‘Social Protection’.)
The full description of these functions are defined here and as you can see there isn’t one specifically for EU spending.
However another data set (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/pesp_cra.htm) we’re using for the next release has more detail.
I searched for all the codes in this data set that have “EU” in the title and copied them here for you:
http://www.archive.org/details/EuSpendingFromCra2009
This is some data that certainly needs checking with the departments to guarantee that it is spending on the European Union. But it is a starting point for further investigation.
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April 30th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Great site. To make it more accessible to a wider audience some informative meta data to give some basic explanations to the lay user, such as key definitions and pointers for more information, would add real value to the site.
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June 9th, 2010 at 9:23 am
I like the site. A question about the data – what happened to 07.02 (Outpatient Services) & 07.03 (Hospital Services) – did they end up amalgamated under 07.01 (Medical Supplies)? If so then the explanation of 07.01 should be fixed to refect this.
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