Well, the data has been dumped and all we’ve discovered is that Whitehall is transparently incomprehensible. It is supposed to reveal 3m items of government expenditure this year. But the picture below is the closest I’ve come to rooting out wasteful spending.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies sound just as baffled as the amateur data trolls. There’s bound to be some way to work this into usable form but it may take a long time. Meanwhile, take a look at the Treasury PESA report, which is their attempt at analysing all this data.
UPDATE: The Open Knowledge Foundation were given early access to the data and have managed to turn it into a searchable database. Still struggling to understand it though. Most of it is in terms of program and spending type — this is not a database of individual transactions. So you’re still better off at this point exploring these graphics of the aggregate data.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey