Public Spending by Function
What does the Government spend money on?
Functional categories
Data
Recent developments
What does the Government spend money on?
The Government spends money on a wide range of functions, such as health, education and defence.
Functional categories
Functional categories are based on the UN Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG), the international standard. Functional analyses differ from departmental spending analyses because they include local authorities as well as central government, and devolved authorities as well as English departments.
Not all public spending can be allocated to a function so a new aggregate is defined called "Total Expenditure on Services". This is spending within Total Managed Expenditure (TME) that can be allocated by function. It covers most expenditure included in TME but excludes some accounting and other adjustments that cannot be allocated to a function. More information on Total Expenditure on Services can be found in Appendix E of Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) 2008.
Data
TME outturns are published quarterly by ONS in the Public Sector Accounts. The central government components of TME can also be updated monthly as part of the public sector finance statistics release. Latest TME data (and its components) are available in the Public Finances Databank .
Public spending by function data are published annually in chapters 4 and 5 of Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA). Key public spending by function data are updated at 3 other times of the year through the Public Spending Annual Outturns News Release.
Recent Developments
The presentation of detailed function analysis has been brought into line with COFOG level 2. The differences in presentation are explained in the note below.
PESA 2005 included an historical series of public spending by function in Table 3.2. The methodology for producing the series is outlined in detail in a technical note.
- PDF file of Production of the Public Expenditure by Function Historical Series - Methodology Note (203KB)
The presentation since PESA 2004 differs from previous presentation of functional spending. The change in methodology was pre-announced on 10 March 2004 in a detailed technical note.
- PDF file of Changes to the Public Expenditure by Function Series Technical Note (10 March 2004) (67KB)
Some documents are available in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website.
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