Investigate

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Digging Up Data

We would really like data on national income, local government spending, central government departmental income and spending and investigation on how local services are funded.

There are two main things we do:

1. Identifying and locating datasets
2. Get them!

To identify the data we use a search engine such as Google. TIP: it really helps to have quite a precise phrase to search for. Do you know the name of the dataset or database you are looking for? If so put that in the search.

Record your results (tersely) even if you found that information you wanted is not available, on our ask list.

If something substantial found register on our CKAN group. If the data isn’t hosted on a website, then you can upload it to either archive.org or Scribd — we use username: wdmmg@okfn.org and can add your email to the account if you would like.

Projects for you to investigate

Projects to get involved with:

How to look up details about your Local Council’s accounts

Look at existing reports

The easiest way to get a feel for your council’s financial health is to look on their website for their yearly accounts and budget.

If you can’t find the website of your local council then you should find it on this spreadsheet of all public bodies.

The accounts will usually be published in a PDF format and the budget will usually be in a spreadsheet. It is much more useful for visualisation of these accounts if they are in a spreadsheet, so it would be very useful if you could write to your council as ask for them to publish their accounts on their website as both a spreadsheet and as a PDF.

Dig a little deeper

You may want to investigate how all the accounts are stored at your local council. I’ve found that just asking for the accounting and procurement data with reasonable redactions (e.g. I don’t want individuals council tax payments) doesn’t work — in general the people who manage the system would need to devote lots of time to figuring out what to do.

I suggest you find out as much as possible about the system before asking for any data. Ask for the type of database (and give examples of systems that are likely) that the accounts are stored on and then ask for the tables in the database and training notes for the system.

A common database that is used to store accounts is the Oracle E-Business Suite, so ask for details on the Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement and any other part of the Oracle E-Business Suite that may contain the data you want (and give instructions for how they can obtain this).

I would also offer your assistance in understanding the structure of the data and extracting the data, saying you would be happy to meet them to explain what you want in more detail and do all you can to help.

Good luck and keep us updated on how this goes on our spreadsheet.

Displays of public spending data

We have visualised two reports on government spending. The Country Regional Analysis and the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis. If you would like to investigate the accounting differences between these two reports then we have a project for you. Please register and leave a note about this project and we will be in touch shortly afterwards.

Search engines for public spending data.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just search for all public spending on a certain resource that interests you, and get an accurate return on it? Well, that is our aim. We already have a search of COINS data. We have a COINS guide and Frequently Asked Questions. If you have better ideas for how to construct a better search of COINS or any other data set then please get in touch.

Deficit and Cuts

We have projects that help to visualise spending cuts and tax increases that are options for the latest budgets. The latest project allows the user to act as a chancellor and close the deficit gap faced by the UK. We have also visualised the June emergency budget. If you would like to get involved with investigating the effect of tax increases or spending cuts or other issues related to the budget then please register your interest with us.

Standards for reporting public body finances

Although there are some great examples of transparency and publishing of public financial data in central and local government, it is sometimes useful to be able to refer to a definition of what we consider good quality financial data. So, we have a list of standards for reporting public finances. If you have additional standards or other improvements for this list then please get in touch.

Special interest groups

We have been looking into public spending in a few hot topic areas: – EU accounts – UN accounts – The Cost of UK Energy

If you are interested to find out more about the spending in these areas and what services are bought, then we would be very pleased to hear from you.

Our research community

If you have any questions about for any of the projects above then the place to ask them is in our research community.

If you would like to learn more about our investigations into the data mentioned here and data we are working hard to get access to then please get in touch.

Suggestions and Tips

As well as the data set, a great description would be very much appreciated, for example if the data is about different regions of the UK — then list the classification system that is used to represent the country. If you are unsure about how to describe the data then please contact our data coordinator (lisa.evans@okfn.org) and we can work on it together.

Making data easier to use

If you would like to convert a PDF to a spreadsheet then please see our question and answer on this.

Making a Freedom of Information request

If you’d like learn how to submit a freedom of information request, we recommend using the website ‘what do they know?’ and we have instructions for how to use it here.