As part of the Prime Minister’s Transparency initiative, the Treasury has today taken the unprecedented step of publishing data from the Combined Online Information System (COINS) for 2008-09 and 2009-10 through data.gov.uk.
Comprising millions of lines, this is the most detailed UK public expenditure data ever released. The Government is committed to being more transparent and open in publishing information about the money it spends, where it spends it, and the results it achieves.
Today’s action is an important step toward giving the public a greater understanding of where their taxes are spent, and how their Government will deliver on its promise to be more open and transparent.
Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury said:
“For too long the previous Government acted as if the public had no right to know where their hard earned taxes were spent. Today we have lifted that veil of secrecy by releasing detailed spending figures dating back to 2008.
We will not stop here – we plan to release more data in the coming months that will be easier for the general public to understand.”
You can get the data from the COINS data page – be warned some of these files decompress to over 4GiB.
2 comments
Comment by Anonymous posted on
I thiught you said transparacy. It turns out I need a degree in computer science to even open it up to have a look. Is this a new way of cover up?
Comment by jenkinsp posted on
These datasets are particularly large so can be quite difficult to access. There is a fair amount of support available though to help you make sense of them.
The Guardian have produced a COINS Explorer interface for people who want to browse the initial release data http://coins.guardian.co.uk/coins-explorer/search, and the Open Knowledge Foundation have been logging some of their learning on accessing the data in this Etherpad: http://pad.okfn.org/coins.
You can also access some frequently asked questions around COINS via http://hm-treasury.gov.uk/psr_coins_faqs.htm