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These pages show a geographical distribution of public expenditure.
Public expenditure is planned and controlled on a departmental basis, except where devolved responsibility lies with the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. In several areas expenditure is planned on a UK or GB basis rather than by country. For example, the Department of Social Security is responsible for the operation of the social security benefit system throughout Great Britain, and the defence budget covers the whole of the UK.
Data are consistent with Chapter 8 of PESA 2004, further data from PESA 2004 will be available in Excel and CSV format shortly.
The PESA 2004 Chapter 8 analyses shown below take known outturn spending data across all government departments and the devolved administrations, and therefore across the whole UK, and split this spending data into spending that can be identified as benefiting individual regions and that which can’t, because it benefits the UK as a whole (such as defence spending). The spending that can be identified as benefiting regions is termed ‘identifiable expenditure’. The analyses below present statistical estimates for the allocation of this identifiable expenditure between the UK countries and the English regions.
On 5 September 2003, ODPM published Identifying the Flow of Public Expenditure into the English Regions , a report on research by Professor Iain McLean of Nuffield College, Oxford, which was sponsored by ODPM, with support by HM Treasury and DEFRA. This research examined the quality of analyses of identifiable expenditure in the English regions, published in PESA 2002, and made recommendations including methods that might be used to improve these analyses. It also found that the research has already directly contributed to producing better estimates in PESA 2003. The government has responded to these recommendations in Professor McLean's report, and a copy of that response is also available by clicking on the link to the Mclean report above. The government response shows how government are taking these recommendations forward to further improve this data, for publication in PESA 2004.
Please see also the following article which gave prior notice of the methodological changes and improvement to the quality of the country and regional analyses in PESA 2004, as a result of work done to implement all the relevant recommendations of the McLean report, plus other improvements
Changes To The Public Expenditure By Country And Region Series
HMTreasury and ONS have also issued the following joint memorandum for consultation, which implements the recommendation from the McLean report that they should jointly produce a memorandum on the rules for measuring regional expenditure under the alternative ‘in’ and ‘for’ methods, and publish it for consultation with users of National Statistics. The following memorandum discusses the use of these different methods, as well as the rules for measurement regional spending under each of them. It explains the advantages and limitations of each approach, and which approach has been used by the ONS and the Treasury in which context, and why. It also includes the actual guidance, based on this memorandum, which was issued by the Treasury to departments who supply data for the country and regional analyses that are published in PESA 2004.
Memorandum by HM Treasury and ONS: Measuring Government Expenditure by Region
The above memorandum is also available on the National Statistics website for consultation documents under the economy them. Users of National Statistics are invited to comment on the above article or memorandum by emailing pesa@hm-treasury.gov.uk or economy@statistics.gov.uk.
Public Spending Statistics index