UK Gov't Spending Details Now Online

krou writes "The UK government has released a treasure trove of public spending data in an effort to lift what Prime Minister David Cameron calls the government's 'cloak of secrecy.' 'The first two tranches of data are from 2008/09 and 2009/10. The Combined Online Information System (Coins) includes what departments were authorised to spend, what they actually spent and what they are forecast to spend in future.' Since the government admits that 'some degree of technical competence' will be needed to use the files, they have asked the Open Knowledge Foundation to help make it 'more accessible,' and have also promised 'more accessible formats' by August. The datasets can be downloaded from data.gov.uk." And on a similarly happy note, reader mccalli writes "Bletchley Park's archive is to be digitised and put online. It seems HP made an offer to help out with scanners and expertise, and the result is that these texts will be made available to all."

Comments

The Guardian have a web app already...

[levell]

The Guardian newspaper have already built an interesting tool for exploring the data.

nice to see Torrent links

[ikoleverhate]

if Her Majesty's Government uses torrents, they must be OK, right?

Re:nice to see Torrent links

[Wowsers]

What they should have done is rename the file something like "Britney Spears entire album collection", then waste the RIAA's bandwidth on them downloading it, and lots of their time decompressing it and checking the files out to see if it contains WAV / FLAC / AAC / MP3 files.

UK data release vs US annual reports?

[AHuxley]

How does the UK spending report shape up vs a US Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_annual_financial_report
That would show an accurate picture of the UKs institutional funds, financial holdings, assets and total investment incomes, for the government.

Re:UK data release vs US annual reports?

[jabithew]

This is raw data, not a spending report. We also have spending reviews; before the general election they were on the HM Treasury Site but now they've been archived. Without the legal requirements for clarity associated with private sector financial reporting, civil servants are able to hide key data in impenetrable waffle. It is also a rather different kettle of fish to the US; our government is ludicrously centralised and almost all spending is from Whitehall. The report is thus so broad in scope as to almost be meaningless. It also makes wading through this raw transaction data much more daunting.

Re:UK data release vs US annual reports?

[DaveGod]

I gather the forthcoming Whole of Government Accounts will be broadly similar. Most importantly, they will be using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and hopefully understandable if you're comfortable enough with the consolidated accounts of a major UK company (and yes even the US is crawling towards adopting IFRS). I'm not sure what the score is here, I thought these were meant to be done for 2006/07 but apparently 2009/10 will be the first set, I think they spent a few years just moving in this direction.

Publication of this Coins data is something different but is a major disclosure. It's almost certainly not going to be of any direct use to the taxpaying public, but for journalists and anybody wanting details on something specific then wow.

I am a little hesitant however. Not many people understand financial information and even fewer are able of putting it in the context of an organisation so massive as the UK government, and UK newspapers and other interested bodies are well versed in manipulating ignorance to their own ends. Even with the best of intentions, the volume of detail here is such that not even a team of researchers has much chance of putting it into context.

Torrrents.

[caluml]

I'm just really impressed that the .gov.uk is using torrents. I'd have expected you'd have had to apply, and it would have been posted to you on a stack of DVDs.

Re:Torrrents.

[TheRaven64]

No, let's hope the RIAA does. It might make them less keen to pass RIAA (or BPI)-friendly legislation in the future...

Re:Splendid

[jabithew]

It's the Daily Mail. They probably just made it up.

I have just started a research project on this

[MarcoF]

It is a contract job for an Italian University, funded with EU money. I am looking for real world examples of the availability of public data like these have actually been good for local businesses, making them sustainable or cheaper to run. Every feedback is welcome. Here are more details on the project: Open Data, Open Society: a research project about openness of public data in EU local administrations. Again, thanks to all who will provide relevant pointers & info!

Re:Splendid

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those 20 million are deceased. Their records are held because of their relationship to a living citizen, which is needed to correctly assess eligibility for certain benefits.

However, there are also some duplicates - people who have for some reason assigned multiple tax records under different National Insurance numbers. There are legitimate reasons for this (for example, foreigners working in the UK are first assigned a temporary record, and later created a permanent record - with these two records then being linked together). However, there are also instances where this is due to fraudulent reasons. One of the key benefits for CIS (the system in question) is fraud detection: before CIS, the same data was scattered across 26 different systems, which naturally makes fraud detection very difficult.

(Disclosure: I was one of the architects for this system)

The downside of all this

[Anonymous Coward]

I am all for transparency but it will also have a negative effect on the efficiency of the government

I work for a non elected government body and there is already that much red tape that it takes two weeks to get a purchase order for items over less than £1000 (having spent up to half a day doing the purchase paperwork and justification).

If we have to document it and everything it adds another layer of junior civil servants who's job it will be to document all the spending for public consumption. This at a time when my budget has been cut by over 1/3 (£200K). Do you really need to know I spent £2K on 64GB Ram for a blade ? Will it enrich your life. We are always being asked to do more with less, but then we look at all these mad hat ideas that drain cash. Cash that could be used to provide better services to you the public.

Most people don't realise but there is an extra ordinary amount of oversight even now. Even our small government dept has 3 levels of external auditing.

To purchase expensive kit (Like i do regularly -ie 40K at a time it can take several months to get it all sorted.

If they want to interfere in every minor purchase and put it online it will cause almost paralysis in most government organisations.

Just my 2ps worth. Posting as AC for obvious reasons.

Re:The downside of all this

[Joce640k]

Presumably that purchase order goes into some sort of computer system even now, the amount spent and a code for type of purchase.

Once it's in there the rest can be automated, no need for a 'layer of junior civil servants' to re-type the data.

If I was paranoid I might suspect there will be another layer of people censoring it and fiddling with it to look good, but that's another story...

Questionable Accounting

[Iyonesco]

From the site: "The ‘fact tables’ are approximately 70MB. With a fast broadband link of 8mbps, it will take approximately 10 minutes to download this file."

70MB at 1MB/second = 600 seconds!?!? This left me rather concerned as to the reliability of the figures on the site. I never went on to look at the data but I can imagine it would be something like this:

Expenses: £100,000,000,000.00
Bureaucracy: £500,000,000,000.00
Propaganda: £25,000,000,000.00
Big Brother: £50,000,000,000.00
Foreign Wars: £10,000,000,000.00

Total: £1.23