Where Does My Money Go?

Expenditure Data

There are now several detailed datasets on Government expenditure available for the UK. The most significant are Council £500 spending, the Departmental £25k spending and the Combined Online Information System (COINS).

COINS is the primary database used by HMT for recording and analysing spending. It has a pseudo-double-entry structure and is the book of "prime entry" for the budget (planning spending) and forecasted outturn (what was actually spent).

A large sample of the COINS data is publicly available at data.gov.uk. We have gathered a variety of useful information to help interpret the COINS data:

• Package for COINS data itself including status of current access requests
• COINS schema and field definitions

The reason that COINS is important to this project is because it contains the main high level reports on public spending and almost all other government reports on spending are directly derived from it including:

• Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis
• Country Regional Analysis
• The Budget
• The Supplementary Budget Information
• The Supply Estimates
• Some of the Office of National Statistics Blue Book
• Some of the Office of National Statistics Pink Book
• The Whole of Government Accounts

While COINS shows spending and income, we also have another dataset called the Country Regional Analysis (CRA) which shows where public spending has effect: package:ukgov-finance-cra.

Income Data

The main package is:

• National income data from HMRC

Additional Data

Although this isn't key data at the present it is also useful:

• Monthly DataBank reports of public spending

[1] More details about the project -- which aims to visualise how the UK government spend public funds -- can be found at Where Does My Money Go?.