To do this we’ve been busy collecting (and cleaning) government time series include projections from 2008, 2010 (before the budget) and 2010 (after the budget), into the google spreadsheet below. Each projection is contained in a different sheet. At present this is only at the level of GDP, total expenditure, total taxation, deficit etc. There’s also a description sheet which gives a bit of information about the structure.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tFggM4NNja9rSzUd_qQTv9w#gid=4

An initial view of a couple of sheets of this work are now available in the budgetizer:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/budget/budgetizer/

This is very much an alpha visualisation – the main thing at this stage is the code to read from multiple sheets and visusalise them as graphs.

Even with this simple view, you can see that while the annual overspend (expenditure over receipts) falls under the post-budget plan, the total deficit remains huge compared to GDP (compared to where it has been over the last 30 years)

Having built this, the plan is to add features to allow users to interactively experiment with different senarios. Even doing this roughly is quite a lot harder as it requires projecting the consequence of changes of policy multiple years into the future.

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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3. In The Beginning There Were Mystery Boxes

I thought the obvious place to look for that kind of information is HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), so, I explored their website. I found:

• A nice section on the HMRC annual reports. These reports gave a very high level breakdown of our national income, which I copied into this CKAN package.
• A nice selection of National Statistics on the tax gathered. Those national statistics give a pretty good overview of the different types of tax paid in different regions, by different genders for a number of different years.

But I wanted to find out more. I wanted to know how they store the tax data and in how much detail, but I couldn’t find any of this on their website.

I knew that HMRC have a contract, called the Aspire contract, with Capgemini to manage all of the countries tax data. I thought a good way to understand the way tax is stored is to understand what Capgemini do for HMRC.

My friend Francis Irving (who works for MySociety) had made a request for the Aspire contract which was rejected.

This is fair enough, we thought, it was a big request, the Aspire contract is probably the size of a lawyers table. So we tried to construct better requests for information. I asked for the performance targets for Capgemini and that was refused.

So this refinement of request followed by rejection of request was a pattern that continued until Francis had a revelation.

Francis explains:

For a while the idea has been in my mind that the statements of Government bank accounts would, ultimately, be an excellent way to get detailed public sector spending information. Recently I heard about the Government Banking Service, and so made an FOI request from HMRC for the most basic of information – a list of which bodies hold accounts using it. This is the response I got. They give several exemptions that only apply to some accounts, but one odd exemption that applies to all the information that I requested. This is section 18(1) of the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005 (CRCA) (via section 44 (another act prohibits disclosure) of the FOI act): “Revenue and Customs officials may not disclose information which is held by the Revenue and Customs in connection with a function of the Revenue and Customs.” This seems to be a “nuclear option” which lets HMRC refuse any FOI request. No ICO complaint has ever won on this one – here’s a list of them that WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers have been keeping. Further investigation reveals that CRCA Section 20 does allow for limited public interest disclosure to various bodies (e.g. police, intelligence bodies, health & safety etc), but to get it published for any other reason you have to get the Treasury to issue a relevant Statutory Instrument. This is problematic, as it means FOI potentially provides no scrutiny of how our tax is collected.

So there we have it! A mystery solved, at least we know where we stand with HMRC. I’ve booked an appointment to see my local MP about this situation.

Thank you to Francis and the “What Do They Know?” volunteers, particularly Alex Skene, for shedding light on this situation.

This meeting makes me want to beam a message out to all councils saying:

“if you publish your data in machine readable form, you pretty much don’t have to worry about presenting this data — there is already a community who will do it all for you for FREE. Everyone wins!“

The outcomes of the meeting where:

• They’re going to give me a copy of their accounts in a spreadsheet.
• They refused to give me an export of their Oracle “Balance Sheet” report.
• All council budgets are published in excel
• They’re going to report their £500 + spending before the Jan 2010.
• When they publish they’re going to make sure their data meets the open data standards defined by Chris Taggart.

Here is some more detail about the meeting for those interested.

Background: I’ve been asking to meet with the finance team in CCC for months. The first thing I did was write to them to request a meeting to explain ‘where does my money go?‘ and get some idea of their finance data. I didn’t hear back so I asked again. Nothing back. So I sent a freedom of information request for the database type, schema and training notes all of which I duly received.

Then I asked for the data, and one of the councilors at CCC saw my request on What Do They Know? and helped me by giving the exact tables that I needed and he also suggested a report to ask for. I asked for all of this and added that I would like to meet as I appreciate it is a big ask.

I didn’t get the data but I did get a meeting.

The meeting: I explained the ‘where does my money go?‘ project. I explained the work the open data community have been doing to clearly show the COINS data, and the amazing progress that was made in a very short time by the treasury giving COINS data in a usable format. I’ve written about this amazing progress before at the beginning of this article for the data.gov.uk blog.

They explained about their current work reporting all spending above £500.

They said that the vast majority of their spending data is below £500, but even so this still is more data than they have every shared before.

They plan to share their data before the Jan 2010 deadline and they are concerned about if the public will be able to interpret it and also how to physically host this large amount data.

I pointed out the open data standards from Chris Taggart and co and how there is a community of people eager to do the work of communicating the spending to the public, and making the data useable will allow them to do this.

They said they would send me a copy of their online accounts in a spreadsheet as this is what they have to convert into a pdf before they put it on their website.

They refused to give any exports of their reports of which there are a number describing in the training notes.

I offered our support for publishing their spending data and they agreed that keeping the lines of communication open with OKFN would be useful to us both.

They were keen to look up Chris’ blog post and the open data standards and said they would make sure they published their data following those guidelines.

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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3. Understanding COINS

COINS – the Combined On-line Information System – is used by the Treasury to collect financial data from across the public sector to support fiscal management, the production of Parliamentary Supply Estimates and public expenditure statistics, the preparation of Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) and to meet data requirements of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

After reading the WGA materials on the Treasury and the Communities and Local Government web pages, and chatting to some very helpful members of the WGA team, my understanding of the WGA exercise is that it identifies exchanges of funds between public bodies. These exchanges include the flow of funds from Central Government bodies down to Local Authorities and all the exchanges of funds between departments. When the transactions between public bodies are identified, the WGA exercise makes some adjustments to avoid double counting the money. So, 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.

As we know the COINS data is made up of spending or income records for each department. In these department records there is a Counter Party ID (CPID),  if that identifies another government department that means that some funds have been exchanged between the two departments.

There are scripts used on the COINS data to look for  eliminations using the CPID code.  which has the code in every department’s spending, if money of the public body money was exchanged with and the WGA team perform lots of checks on this. You can see this process happening in the adjustments table in COINS.

There are two guides to the WGA, one for  local authorities and the other for central government departments.

Central Government Accounts

Point2.4. of the Guide for the C-Pack (PDF) says:

The key deliverable is the C-Pack, and the upload of Resource Accounts data and CPID data into COINS.

Local Authority Accounts

In fact the WAG guide for local authorities states:

Local government controls over 50% of public sector fixed assets, accounts for about 25% of net public expenditure and represents 10% of UK GDP.

Now, I thought this missing detail in COINS might be because the WGA would be published separately.

There is a WGA report expected in spring 2011, but on further investigation it transpires that the level of detail will be the same as company accounts. We will get some extra details in this report, for example spending on PFIs will be included for the first time. But essentially we will miss out on all the lovely detail from the L-packs and C-packs.

The Auditing

Auditing, I believe in the context of WGA, means matching up buyers and providers:

A perfect match is: Barnet Council purchases £5.5 m from Enfield Council. Enfield Concil sales £5.5 m to Barnet Council.

The COINS scripts would eliminate this to zero as perfect match.

Another example: Barnet Council purchases £5.0 m from Enfield Council. Enfield Council sales £5.5 m to Barnet Council. COINS would eliminate 5.0m and and put 0.5M into suspense. The the suspense needs to be investigated more to see where the mistake is. This investigation is the job of the Whole of Government’s Account team. You can set a tolerance in COINS, which is the extent of the difference between two accounts it will put into suspense. The tolerance was set to 5.0m for 2008/09 accounts. I will be set to 1.0m for 2009/10 accounts.

Conclusion

The WAG is an exercise in eliminating excess data that clouds the picture of public spending and income.  The WAG team’s work seem to keep process of reporting spending and income more manageable. This is completely understandable. But on the other hand it would be great to have this detail of exchanges of funds so we can understand public spending as it really is.

When the coalition announced that councils would have to publish all spending over £500 by January next year, there’s been a palpable excitement in the open data and transparency community at the thought of what could be done with it (not least understanding and improving the balance of councils’ relationships with suppliers).

Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government Eric Pickles followed this up with a letter to councils saying, “I don’t expect everyone to do it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it.” Great. Raw Data Now, in the words of Tim-Berners Lee.

Now, however, with barely the ink dry, the reality is looking not just a bit messy, a bit of a first attempt (which would be fine and understandable given the timescale), but Not Open At All.

As a member of the Local Public Data Panel, I’ve worked with other members and councils to draw up some clear and pragmatic draft guidelines for publishing the local spending data. We’ve had a great response in the comments and in conversations, and together with some lessons I did on importing the existing data, I think these will allow us to do a second draft soon.

One thing we weren’t explicit in that first draft – because we took it for granted – was that the data had to be open, and free for reuse by all. Equality of access by all is essential.

So I’ve been watching the activities of Spikes Cavell’s SpotlightOnSpend with some wariness and now those fears seem to have been borne out, as the company seems to set out not to consume the open data that councils are publishing, but to control this data.

The idea seems to be that councils should give Spikes Cavell privileged access to their detailed invoice information, which the company then adds to their proprietry and definitely non-open database, and then publishes an extract of this information on the SpotlightOnSpend website. Exactly what information they get, and under what terms isn’t disclosed anywhere.

The website’s got most of the buzzwords: transparency, accessible, efficiency. It’s even got a friendly .org.uk domain. If that’s not enough to convince councils, liberally sprinkled around the site is an apparent endorsement from the Secretary of State himself:

I’m really excited about the opportunities of transparency and it’s something this government is utterly committed to. spotlightonspend demonstrates that, when innovative businesses work with far-sighted public bodies, we can inform the public, reduce costs and improve democracy both locally and nationally.

However, when you go to the data and click on the download link this is what you get:

Note the “This data is for your personal use only”  (not to mention the fact that the use of a captcha’ to screen out machines downloading the data means, er, you can’t use machines to automatically download the data, which is sort of the point of publishing the data in a machine-readable way).

Never mind, surely you can just head over to the council’s website and download the data from there? No chance. This is what you get on the Guildford website:

You can search and view this financial data using a new Spotlight on Spend national website. Just follow the link found in the offsite links section of this page.

What about Mole Valley Council:

This data is now available on the spotlight on spend website. You can look at categories and individual suppliers to see how much has been spent in each area or you can download all the data to see individual transactions.

But what about Windsor & Maidenhead, who are closely affiliated with the project, and who are publishing data on their website? Well, download the data from SpotlightOnSpend and it’s rather different from the published data. Different in that it is missing core data that is in W&M published data (e.g. categories), and that includes data that isn’t in the published data (e.g. data from 2008).

So the upshot seems to be this, councils hand over all their valuable financial data to a company which aggregates for its own purposes, and, er, doesn’t open up the data, shooting down all those goals of mashing up the data, using the community to analyse and undermining much of the good work that’s been done.

It’s worth linking here to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s draft guidelines on reporting of Government Finances (disclosure: I helped draw them up), of which the first point is ‘Make data openly available using an explicit license’. And let me be absolutely clear here: this is not open data, not a desirable approach, will not achieve the results of transparency or of equality of access, and is not good for the public sector.

I’m hoping this is a matter of councils and the Secretary of State not understanding the process and implications of giving this data to Spike Cavell on a privileged basis. If not, perhaps it could be the first test case for the newly setup of Public Sector Transparency Board to rule on.

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Collaborating with David McCandless, Where Does My Money Go? have created a simple visualization to help you understand and contextualise the budget, and answer some basic questions such as: How much impact will the emergency budget have on the £156bn budget deficit? And what will those mind-boggling billion pound amounts actually mean?

Embed

Want to use this graphic in your own site or in the news? We’re happy for you to do so as long as long as you explicitly credit us and have a link back to this url. Here’s an html code snippet to do this:

Want a higher-res version, e.g. for print? You can get it here: http://static.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/i/deficit_budget_print.pdf

Credits

A Where Does My Money Go? visualization by David McCandless / InformationIsBeautiful, research by Lisa Evans and Tim Hubbard using on information from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and HM Treasury.

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1. Can You Close the Deficit Gap?
2. Putting the cuts into context: where is that £6 billion going to come from?
3. New mockups for “Where Does My Money Go?”

More information:

• Closing the Deficit Gap App
  • On the Guardian Datablog
• http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/
• http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/faq/

The application was created by the Where Does My Money Go? team. Researched by Lisa Evans and Tim Hubbard using many figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Visualized by Rufus Pollock and Tim Hubbard using the thejit and jquery.

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3. Alpha Release of Where Does My Money Go? Prototype

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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