With the UK election over, reductions in public spending are currently at the top of the agenda. Whichever way you cut it, taxpayers and public service users look set to face big changes. The ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ dashboard – a free, interactive online tool from the Open Knowledge Foundation – will help to make sense of the £6 billion of spending cuts to be announced on Monday.

The project allows the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past 6 years, in an intuitive way using maps, timelines and graphs. The latest release includes:

• A new mini-app called ‘Where are the cuts?‘ which will capture and visualise spending cuts as they happen.
• A new dashboard for visualising and exploring spending by region, type or over time – breaking down the jargon to make it easier to understand official spending categories.
• A new Where Does My Money Go? data store. This houses all the cleaned-up, nicely formatted data, sourced from many different government departments, and makes it available both via the web and and an API, enabling others to reuse, investigate and re-present the data.

In addition to new information about the spending cuts, the Where Does My Money Go? project plans to represent detailed information from the COINS database, the ‘holy grail’ of spending data, which George Osborne committed to publishing shortly after this election.

Dr Rufus Pollock, Economist from the University of Cambridge and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, comments:

It is crucial that the public are able to understand how they will be affected by the cuts to be announced on Monday – which depends on having a ‘bigger picture’ of where spending currently goes. We will be working hard to show the implications of spending cuts as they are announced and to track speculation about where cuts will be made in the future. Our project aims to close the loop between public information on spending and the public.

Related posts:

1. Where Does My Money Go? Prototype Launched We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/ Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in...
2. Opening up UK local spending data Just before Christmas, the UK Government announced a new report on Making local public expenditure data public, and the development of Local Spending Reports. The report outlines government plans to publish lots more information on where UK public money is...
3. Warwickshire County Council launch new open data site! Warwickshire County Council pinged us earlier this week to let us know about the launch of their new open data site! The site hosts a range of data sets – available in CVS or XML. For example there are details...