Date published: 2009/12/12
The BBC says:
Online tools can now help citizens curious about what their taxes are being spent on.
The Where Does My Money Go website has combined spending figures with visualisation tools to show how the cash is divided.
The data can be explored through a series of maps, timelines and graphs.
Created by the Open Knowledge Foundation, it brings together figures since 2003 that are currently held by many official departments and agencies.
...
While the US has legislation that requires government departments and agencies to put spending figures in one place, the UK has no such laws.As a result, said the Open Knowledge Foundation, "spending figures often require background knowledge to interpret and can be hard put into context".
The initial site has been put together with figures from HM Treasury but, said the Foundation, it was working to include numbers from many more sources to make it more comprehensive. Eventually visitors will be able to drill down to find out spending at local levels.
This kind of effort is to be applauded. Unfortunately in its current ("prototype") state, it suffers from exactly the problem that the Open Knowledge Foundation points out, namely that one needs "background knowledge to interpret" the data and it "can be hard put into context". From looking at their (very pretty) graphs, it's not obvious if anything is amiss or not unless you are a complete anorak about government spending (in which case you don't need this website).
For example, they have spending figures as a function of time, but it's not even clear if they have adjusted for inflation in any way (probably not). As another example, they have graphs showing regional per capita spending variations relative to the national average, and (surprise) the richer areas on the whole put more money in than they get out. But that's as it should be, so the real question is not that but whether (for example) governments bias spending towards areas for electoral reasons (almost certainly the case, not surprisingly).
No doubt the website will improve with time. And its ultimate worth will be when someone spots some blatant waste or fraud using their data.
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