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. An overview of current year spending by function is shown in the chart below.
Source: HM Treasury Pre-Budget Report, 2004-05 figures. Other expenditure includes spending on general public services; recreation, culture and religion; international cooperation and development; public service pensions; plus spending yet to be allocated and some accounting adjustments. Social protection includes tax credit payments in excess of an individual's tax liability, which are now counted in AME, in line with OECD guidelines. Figures may not sum to total due to rounding.
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. Further information on HMT functional analysis, including its derivation from UN COFOG, is available in the following PDF file.
> PDF file of Guide to HMT functional analyses (201kb)
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 that can be allocated by function. It covers most expenditure included in Total Managed Expenditure (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 F of Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) 2004.
> PDF file of PESA 2004 Appendix F: Expenditure on Services (51kb)
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 chapter 3 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 .
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Excel file of latest and historical public spending by function data (117kb)
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CSV file of latest and historical public spending by function data (10kb)
> PDF file of PESA 2004 Chapter 3 (93kb)
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Excel file of PESA 2004 Chapter 3 tables (166kb)
>
CSV file of PESA 2004 Chapter 3 tables (32kb)
Recent Developments
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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