Government spending to be revealed

David Cameron said he wanted to remove the 'cloak of secrecy' from official information
12 April 2012

A detailed breakdown of Government spending over the past two years is to be released by the Treasury for the first time as part of a openness drive.

The Combined On-line Information System - known as Coins - is one of a raft of databases Prime Minister David Cameron has demanded be released by Whitehall departments.

It contains millions of individual lines of public sector expenditure, and its release had previously been blocked from publication despite frequent requests.

Officials tried to play down initial public expectations of the release, pointing out that the raw data would be meaningless to most voters. Instead, they hope institutions and experts will use their technical expertise to eventually turn it into a more-easily accessible format.

Chancellor George Osborne complained last year that Gordon Brown had intervened to deny his call for the figures to be published to help him formulate opposition policy.

The claim was strongly denied by Labour, which said the decision was taken by the civil service, but Mr Osborne promised to release the data if he took over at the Treasury.

Earlier this week, the names, pay and perks of the 172 senior civil servants earning more than £150,000 were published were released in the first part of the disclosure programme.It was also announced that people will be able to check the weekly MRSA and Clostridium difficile (C diff) rates at their local hospital.

Government contracts over £10,000 will be published on a single website from September with items of central government spending over £25,000 and local government over £500 shortly afterwards.

The Prime Minister said he wanted to remove the "cloak of secrecy" from official information in a bid to restore public trust in politics and allow them to be used by experts.

Academic studies have suggested allowing outside experts to build web applications and sites around government data could contribute up to £6 billion to the economy.

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