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UK Gov't Spending Details Now Online

Posted by timothy on from the I'll-have-what-they're-having dept.

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."

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Torrrents. by caluml · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  2. Re:Splendid by jabithew · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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  3. Re:Splendid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)