June 19 Update: PESA 2009

On June 19, 2009, HM Treasury published its Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) for 2009. ukpublicspending.co.uk uses PESA's tables of public spending at the "sub-function" level as its major data source for UK public spending.

ukpublicspending.co.uk has now updated its spending tables using data from PESA 2009. The update includes outturn spending data for 2007-08, estimated outturn data for 2008-09, and plan data for 2009-10 and 2010-11. ukpublicspending.co.uk uses Table 6.4 for Central Government expenditure, Table 7.4 for Local Authority expenditure, and Table 8.3 for Public Corporation capital expenditure.

Since HM Treasury does not provide plan estimates for Local Authority spending, ukpublicspending.co.uk provides "guesstimates" instead. This is done by extending the percentage increase in spending between 2007-08 and 2008-09 for each sub-function through the plan years.

Normally, HM Treasury would have supplied, in PESA 2009, plan spending estimates for the third out-year, 2011-12. But this year it did not. ukpublicspending.co.uk has not attempted to "guesstimate" spending for 1011-12, since it is expected that the new government taking power by May 2010 will implement significant cuts in public spending.

May 30 Update: Outturn Numbers for 2007-08

On May 29, 2009, HM Treasury released National Statistics spending data for the UK for the years 2003-04 through 2007-08. UKpublicSpending.co.uk has updated spending for 2008 to include the new data.

UKpublicSpending.co.uk is still waiting on HM Treasury for new estimated outturn data for 2008-09 and plan data for 2009-10 and later years. Presumably this will be published with the final Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2009 report, when published.

April 26: New Home Page

We’ve created a new home page for ukpublicspending.co.uk.

Why? Because ukpublicspending.co.uk is not just for policy wonks but for ordinary Britons concerned about where their money goes.

The new home page features three charts and a small table about public spending, central and local, in the United Kingdom:

• A bar chart of total public spending in the UK centering on the current year
• A pie chart showing how central government and local authority spending divide up the spending pie
• A pie chart showing the division of the economy into private sector and public sector
• A table showing total public spending and debt in the UK over five years

If you like, you can copy the charts and save them on your own computer.

But what if you are conservative and like the old ways at ukpublicspending.co.uk? What if you like a comforting wall of numbers instead of a bunch of charts? No problem. Just click here and you’ll get to the “classic” ukpublicspending.co.uk home page.

On the ukpublicspending.co.uk main menu across the top of every page, we now have the following tabs:

• HOME - the new home page
• NUMBERS - the “classic” home page
• CHARTS - the time-series chart page (also has download feature)
• BUDGET - headline charts on the current uk budget
• DOWNLOAD - the gateway to data downloading at ukpublicspending.co.uk

If you’d like to comment on this change, please use the comments section below, or the Leave a Comment link in the right column.