what does the government spend money on?

Now, I’m not an accountant and I’m not a statistician and personally I don’t have a political axe to grind, I just want some answers to this question that make sense.

This attitude gives me a lot of freedom: I don’t have to get bogged down in any system of understanding spending unless it really helps. But this attitude also gives me a lot of opportunity to look a right idiot, because I’m effectively feeling my way around this unfamiliar financial and political world, pushing for information that may or may not be useful in the end, asking questions that must seem really stupid to experts.

I think it’s only fair that I document my fools progress so that other people who might be on a similar mission can be helped along their way.

So, from the beginning to right now, this is what I’ve found out about government money.

I should add that public spending is making more and more sense to me these days and while I don’t have all the answers right now, I do have a vision for the future and some useful stuff to share.

In the beginning

When I first thought about government spending I had some vague idea that there would be lists of spending, one for each department or maybe one big list for all of government, showing money in and money out for each department. It would just be a matter of finding these sacred and quite possibly hidden lists. I mean someone in the department must be keeping track of the money in and out, right?

The people at Where Does My Money Go? had something that matched my idea of a list of spending. The list they found on the Treasury website showed different government departments and how much they had spent on certain types of public services. I helped to interpret this and the team went on to make this colourful interactive display.

The beauty of this display is allows drilling down into the details of the spending. This is a relatively new technology and lends itself to spending data nicely, it makes those lists accessible and it doesn’t feel like work to look through them they way it does to look into a spreadsheet.

But we quickly found that the list we had used raised more questions than it answered. We only had spending for certain departments, nothing in detail on local councils, and the only details we had were in these odd sounding categories of spending that were designed to allow comparisons between UN countries.

I had a feeling that there must be more detail that we weren’t getting, but where was it?

Therein’ I pestered the heck out of the poor folks at the Treasury about where these spending lists are stored and what else is stored there.

The short answer is that it was all stored in something aptly called COINS, which is a database for frequently revised budgets and something else that is really, really interesting and that I’ll come back to shortly.

A moment of clarity

While I was looking at this spending it slowly dawned on me that just looking at money in and out isn’t the full story of the way public money is managed. For one thing the lists of money in and out, on their own, soon become unwieldy and make it hard for people to answer questions about public spending.

For another thing, Governments don’t just receive and spend money, their wealth is also made up of the things they own like buildings, roads and also determined by the money they owe — the debts as we all know too well.

This is when I found out that accountants have elegant ways to deal with all of this financial jumble.

Let me explain accountancy in the terms I’ve come to understand it.

There are three main figures to consider.

Let’s split the finances of an organisation into either 1) something it is owed or owns and 2) something it owes to someone else. That is two of the 3 main figures explained already.

Just these two figures can give us a simple but important measure of how healthy the finances are. Hypothetically if the organisation received everything it was owed and then sold off everything it has and used that to pay off all its debts, how much would be left? What is left is our third figure. This is what all the people who invested in the organisation would be left with for their return on their investment.

For the mathematically minded this can be expressed at:

1 – 2 = 3 or owed and owned – debts = return to investors

We should find that if we sum the amount of money that people invest and the profit the organisation makes, the result is equal to the third figure.

Just to put this into context for the case where the organisation is a council or government body, the investors are the taxpayers and the bond buyers.

Another way of looking at these three figures is that organisation is ultimately balancing the money it has for its activities and the money it receives and borrows to make its activities happen. So it balances what it owns and is owed (figure 1) with its debts and investments and profits (figures 2 and 3).

For the mathematically minded that is:

2 + 3 = 1 or investment and profits + debts = owned and owed

just a rearrangement of first expression.

If you ever heard of double entry book-keeping then keeping this equation equal is basically it: accounting for what is produced with what is needed to produce it.

There’s lots more to accounting than this, obviously, but I hope I’ve conveyed that this way of categorising financial information is neat and yields useful information.

Here’s the killer

You might ask: wouldn’t it be ideal if each publicly funded body published their accounts under these categories so we can understand their financial health?

It turns out that the government have been producing resource accounts for every department and every local authority for years, and this is the killer: in 2001, yes, 10 years ago, they even produced a guide to interpreting these accounts so that we, the public, can extract all kinds of useful information.

You might ask: wouldn’t it be ideal if someone collected together all the public accounts? Even better if they summed the accounts into one set by eliminating all double counting where public bodies exchange money between themselves.

It seems that at the same time as the resource accounts started to emerge in the early 2000s, the Treasury started to run something called ‘Whole of Government Accounts’. It brings together, or consolidates, all the resource accounts of pretty much every public body into one set of resource accounts. What a perfect way to categorise all public spending at a high level.

Guess where Whole of Government Accounts is stored? In COINS. Disappointingly when COINS was published all of the Whole of Government Accounts was removed. The Treasury plan to publish the first ever version of Whole of Government Accounts this spring.

The vision for the future

The government is currently publishing more spending information than any of their predecessors. We have all central government spending over £25,000 and soon we’ll have all local government spending over £500.

How do we make some sense out of all this spending data?

Lots of information can be made manageable if it can be categorised well.

I’m interested in using the categorisation system in the resource accounts. According to the introduction to resource accounts, it is possible to calculate departmental costs ranging from staff wages to money spent on programmes with their own objectives, as well as lots of useful information about assets and liabilities (what I referred to as figures 1 and 2 above).

I believe using this accounting system and allowing a user to ‘drill down’, as they currently do in Where Does My Money Go?, from this high level organised system into the details of the spending will give ‘accountability’ to the accounts.

There are many difficulties in data compatibility between the resource accounts and the lists of transactions that are currently being published, but I think with some iterations of the data being published, these difficulties could be overcome.

What do you think?

It is the ‘somewhere’ we’ve been looking into recently — we’ve been investigating the stage where the money leaves the government hands, who benefits and in what way?

The Treasury devoted some resource to answering this exact question.

The Treasury Data

The data set the Treasury have is called the Country Regional Analysis (CRA). We’ve collected all years of this report back to 2005 in a CKAN package.

How the data is gathered

Every year the Treasury gather the CRA data by giving each central government department a spreadsheet. There is an example CRA spreadsheet on the CRA page.

You can see that the Treasury fill the spreadsheet with the department’s spending codes (programme object group) from COINS. The department is then asked to work out which regions, in the country, benefited from each of their spending codes.

The regions are quite crude, the whole of England is split into 9 regions and then there is the option of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

There is also an option for everyone in the world befits, this is called Non-ID.

Some of the ways of tracing the funds are easy, say, if there is a spending code for a local initiative that people from only one region are entitled to.

A more complex analysis would be something like if there is a spending code for a museum that people travel from all over the country to see, then a statistician is called upon, and they will determine which parts of the country benefit from this service, probably based on visitor surveys etc.

How to get something useful out of the CRA

The 2009 CRA data had lots of inconsistent use of classification of the spending. The classification of spending used in the CRA is the the United Nations system called Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG). In CRA 2009 some items of spending has only one level of detail in COFOG and most other lines had two levels of detail of COFOG. To be consistent we attempted to get all lines of spending to have the most detailed level of spending. We wrote scripts to fix many of these problems.

The 2010 CRA is much better but still requires some work. The 2010 CRA comes in two sets. Both sets describe the same spending, it is just one (called table 9) describes the areas the money was spent in more detail, and the other data set (called table 10) describes the type of spending in more detail.

Table 9 and 10 have to following fields in common:

• Department code
• Department name
• COFOG level 1
• HMT Functional Classification
• Programme Object Groups
• Programme Object Group alias
• ID and non ID
• CAP or CUR
• spending for dates 2004-05 to 2009-10

when we find a match between table 9 data and table 10 data for the fields above then we need to give it:

the NUTS 1 region code and spending for 2010-11 from table 9

and the ‘CG LG or PC’, COFOG 2 and HMT subfunction class from value from table 10

Then the full detail of the spending in one line.

When this join is done, there is one more problem to fix with the data. This issue all stems from the fact that local authorities do not have programme object groups.

We think the best solution is to replace the ‘dummy sprog …’ programme object group that is used in the CRA for local authority spending, with something like ‘Local Authority Spending’ rather than using ‘Unknown’.

What we have done with the CRA

We, at ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ have used the Treasury’s data for this display: But I’m sure there are many more uses to be had.

It’s really easy now, you just need to paste in the url of a place the cut is reported … and that’s it!

You can add more details about the cut on the next page of the form, but it is not required as we will do the rest.

Also I made a spreadsheet of all the Tax Payers Allience proposed £50 billion spending cuts.

Would be really interested to see how these suggested cuts compare with what’s happening in reality, and also the suggested cuts of, say, the IFS.

Please contact us if you want to help with those comparisons.

What interests me about the climate change issue are the two competing requirements: on the one hand we have to provide affordable energy to meet an increasing energy demand as the population grows, on the other hand we have to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions (by 80% on 1990 levels by 2050) as set in the 2008 Climate Change Act.

The competition arises from the fact that the technologies that tend to emit carbon in the greatest levels are currently the most affordable and cost effective.

Unless there is a dramatic improvement in the cost effectiveness of low carbon energy sources or a dramatic reduction in the energy used then requirement 1 and 2 will conflict to a greater and greater degree in the next 40 years.

I’m not the only one who sees trouble ahead.

Last week the Department for Energy and Climate Change presented the public with an open source tool, which aims to show the effect of tweaking the supply and demand aspects of our energy system, and the effects this will have on our carbon emissions.

The tool is a carbon calculator that looks like this:

Once you have tweaked to get Britain the right carbon reduction and energy supply for 2050, and your happy with the results, there is a public consultation you can complete to let the government know.

The tool shows what is physically possible.

It does not show, within what is physically possible, what is economically possible. That is the next step.

I’ve been doing some research into the cost of energy systems.

I’d been looking for good, detailed data on how much the government spends on our current energy infrastructure, and since working on WDMMG I’ve found, pretty much, what I was looking for. I learnt about the Country Regional Analysis that HM Treasury publishes yearly to show the parts of the country that have benefit from UK public spending.

I took the Country Regional Analysis report and I’ve separated out all the codes that impact on our energy infrastructure and carbon emissions and their associated costs for 2008/09.

You can see the results of my investigation at my Many Eyes account.

I’m being quite careful about the summing these costs, as some of the figures are negative, which I believe means that they are income generating. But more research is required on this.

I have also been requesting the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s spending on different energy sources. So far you can see that for 2008/09 I’m getting a cost of £26 million, in total.

I’ll be writing a follow up post to this one, when I have a display of these Department of Energy and Climate Change costs.

I hope that calculating the costs of our current energy system will form a good baseline for discussions about the cost of our energy system leading up to 2050.

If you would like to work on this project with me then please add your details to our get involved page.

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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Related posts:

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

But in what form are each of these different types of financial data entered into COINS? To answer this question for the Whole Of Government Accounts (WGA) data, I’ve been looking more closely at the data gathered for this exercise.

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 is the code in every department’s spending showing if and with whom the money of the public body money was exchanged with. 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

The process of WGA for Central Government departments is simply that each central government department is required to fill in a C-Pack once a year, which is a spreadsheet constructed by the WGA team.

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

The WGA process for Local Authorities is a slightly different exercise. The Local Authority is asked by WGA to fill in an L-Pack once a year. If you follow that link to the L-Pack excel spreadsheet that the Communities and Local Government branch of WGA prepare, they you will see that it is quite a complex looking creature. I’m going on a training course to understand it better, but I do know that the results of every local authority filling out this form amounts to quite a significant documentation of public spending and income.

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, here is the interesting part. The Local Authority spending and income that is recorded in the L-Pack is not in the COINS data that was published recently.

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.

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

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

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

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

What’s important in COINS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I get meaningful results out of COINS?

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

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

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

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

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

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Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COINS: A User Guide

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

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

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

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

Key features:

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

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

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Related posts:

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