Government Budget / 2013 90% open

What data is expected?

National government budget at a high level. This category is looking at budgets, or the planned government expenditure for the upcoming year, and not the actual expenditure. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

• Planned budget divided by government department and sub-department
• Updated once a year.
• The budget should include descriptions regarding the different budget sections.

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? Yes (No URL given)
•   Is the data available for free? Yes
•   Is the data machine readable? Yes (CSV)
•   Available in bulk? Yes
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? No
•   Publicly available? Yes
•   Is data in digital form? Yes
•   Is the data available online? Yes (Here)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

The position seems to be as follows. There is an annual "Budget speech" and documents are published online by HM Treasury and are re-useable under the terms of the UK's Open Government Licence. Main documents are in PDF but some raw data is also provided in Excel format. However this does not usually include detailed departmental budgets. Departmental level budgets are in a number of places, but the two collections available regularly free of charge under the UK Open Government Licence are: (1) the annual "Estimates" published each April for the financial year commencing that April. These are published in PDF format department by department and are at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmt-main-estimates for the last three years 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. This dataset is "up to date" (2) the same, and some more detailed, data is contained in the "Plans" part of the COINS/OSCAR dataset http://data.gov.uk/dataset/coins (this also contains matching expenditure information). Although the expenditure information is published quarterly, the "plans" are not currently published in COINS data until the end of the financial year to which they relate. Once Plans information is available on COINS it is available for bulk download in machine readable format (CSV). In assessing the ratings fairly it was necessary to choose between the "Estimates" and "COINS" versions - the COINS version seemed closer to the ideal, even though it was not as up to date, and that is assessed here.