About our data

What data do you use for the Where Does My Money Go visualizations?

All our visualizations use the same data: the Country Regional Analysis, published each year by HM Treasury.

The Country Regional Analysis (CRA) is essentially about regional spending. It aims to show where in the UK people have benefited from the money allocated to each government department.

Each government department tracks where its money is spent, and then this data is collated by the Treasury in February each year and made publicly available.

How do you decide on the classifications you use in the visualization – Health, Culture, and so on?

These are United Nations classifications, published as part of the CRA.

This bit is complex, so bear with us. THe CRA shows how much spending goes to each department’s individual programmes of work. Each programme is tagged with a ‘function of government’, defined using the United Nations’ official international categories, which are broad enough to be used all around the world – the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG).

When we create our visualizations, we add up all the spending items in each category. In the finished visualization, what you see is the total spending in each COFOG category.

How recent is this data?

We have copies of the CRA data for each year from 2005-2010,  but in the visualizations you see here, we’re using the data from 2010.

How does your tax calculator work?

It won’t surprise you to learn that tax in the UK is pretty complex. It’s very hard to calculate exactly how much tax an individual pays, including all indirect taxes such as VAT and alcohol duty – we certainly don’t claim that our figures are perfectly accurate.

However, unlike most ‘tax calculators’, which only include direct taxes such as income tax and National Insurance, we did want to calculate the effects of indirect taxes. So we used high-level figures for the total tax, direct and indirect, paid by households in each income decile (Table 14 in this National Statistics report).

When you enter your income, we use linear interpolation to calculate whereabouts you are on the distribution of income deciles, and thus roughly how much tax you pay in total.

If these are international categories, can I see spending classified this way for my country?

The COFOG categories are international, so yes – it should be possible to compare spending across different countries that make their spending publicly available.

If you know of data published in this way for your country, please email us at wdmmg@okfn.org.

What other data sets do you use at Where Does My Money Go?

We’re interested in all sorts of public spending data – if you’re also interested in this data, or if you know a dataset that we haven’t covered here, please get in touch.

  • Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis: We use the excellent Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) as published by the Treasury, annually soon after the Budget. This classifies public spending by combinations of:
    • government function (defined by the UN Classification Of the Functions Of Government (COFOG) for 2007 onwards) government department
    • area of the country (defined by the 1NUTS12 classification system)
    • time (estimates of future spending and reviews of past spending)
    • forms of aggregation (this includes dividing spending between DEL and AME, resource (near-cash and non-cash) and capital, and administration and programme budgets).
  • Blue Book: We also have a ongoing interest in the Office for National Statistics’ Blue Book, which summarises a vast range of data collected from central government, local government business. The Blue Book uses the European System of Accounts – a different classification system from COFOG. We have electronic copies of the Blue Book from 2000-2010.
  • National Income: We have a long standing interest in national income data from HM Revenue and Customs. We can determine the rules of tax collection, but the data about the taxes collected is limited to references to national statistics.

Do you have data on local government?

Yes we do – we have high-level local government spending data in PESA and in the Communities and Local Government report ‘Local Government Financial Statistics England‘.

There are searchable details about local government spending at Openly Local and the Audit Commission’s One Place.

What data are you currently investigating?

We are currently building up our understanding of the Whole of Government Accounts. These include every public body’s balance sheet and cash flow statements, consolidated and checked for duplication.

We watching very closely the publication of spending over £500 by local authorities and central government spending over £25,000.

Can you visualize my data?

Yes! If you have data you would like to see beautifully visualized then please contact wdmmg@okfn.org.