Posted by Suzanne Flynn
Last week, for the first time, the UK Treasury released the Combined On-line Information System—known as COINS—covering millions of individual lines of public sector expenditure. It is one of a raft of Whitehall databases to be made public as part of the new coalition government's commitment to greater openness (salaries of top civil servants earning over £150,000 is another). Naturally, the British press has leapt on some key data from the database: a headline in at least two broadsheets proclaimed that during the past year the (old) government spent 1.8 billion pounds on consultants alone. Easy to criticize the spending, but the detail does not tell us what those consultancy contracts achieved.
The Treasury press notice hailed it as ''the most detailed UK public expenditure data ever released''. However, it also suggested it would be of more interest to ''institutions and experts'' than the ordinary public as the material was ''complex'' and was being released ''in its raw form, requiring technical expertise to process''. My experience confirmed this, I failed to download the main data files (only the adjustment files which then had to be uploaded into MS Access to be meaningful), it seems the main file is too large for my PC to cope with, once downloaded the files are in access of 500Mb. The Treasury has helpfully provided a 31 page guidance note and a promise that more directly useful and accessible datasets that draw on the contents of the COINS databases will be available from August this year. Already software companies have developed solutions to enable easy access and data manipulation.
