Government spending details published

The government has taken another great step forward today by publishing its spending charts for 2008/09 and 2009/10. The combined online information system (or COINS) includes what departments were authorised to spend, what they actually spent and what they are forecast to spend. The data published today is in a difficult format and will take a long time to analyse. However, the Government has promised to start publishing data in a common accessible format by August, and so that will be the starting point in which everyday people without a great knowledge of accounting and IT can start to look at the date theirselves. But, if you can’t wait that long the Open Knowledge Foundation has made a start here. It will no doubt be a major tool for scrutinising the spending decisions of Labour ministers in the past, but I am wondering whether this data will continue to be published as it comes available. It seems not after reading Mark Rossenberg’s blog on the BBC;

Update 1130: This morning, I have also received a freedom-of-information response [570Kb PDF] from the Treasury which makes clear there are limits to the coalition government’s open-data policy.

The Treasury is refusing to provide access to the current contents of the Coins database. The information it has provided today is historical data for 2008/9 and 2009/10, although the figures for the latter year are not yet complete. It is planning to issue previous years’ data back to 2005/6 within the next fortnight.

However, the Treasury has told me today that it will not release data for current and future years, because this relates to the formulation of government policy, and some of it - for example, that relating to government trading funds - is also commercially sensitive. It argues that the material is exempt under the Freedom of Information Act because the balance of the public interest is against publication. It says that Coins data for 2010/11 will not be issued until June next year.

Last year George Osborne attacked Gordon Brown for not giving him access to Coins data. He was clearly referring to current data rather than historical information. In an interview with the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson, he said: “We will publish all this information, we will make it available to future oppositions”.

It’s a good start but not good enough. Transparency should not be a tool for attacking previous governments but as a means of holding the current government to account. I’m sure spending on any commercially sensitive areas could be censored on the COINS list until those policies have been announced.