Page updated: 30 Apr 2012
Publication of transactions over £25,000
We are publishing details of items that we spend over £25,000 to improve openness and transparency in public spending.
On 31 May 2010 the Prime Minister wrote to Secretaries of State inviting them to support his drive to improve the transparency of how public funds are used by publishing central government expenditure over £25,000.
When will we publish the data?
We will publish spend monthly, starting in November 2010, where spend in October will be published by working day 15 (19 November 2010). We'll then publish monthly thereafter.
We have backdated our publication of data in monthly files from 1 April 2010 to 30 September 2010, and these are available to download below.
The data is taken directly from our financial management system, and as such is in a fairly raw format. The amounts shown exclude the VAT element.
There are some items of expenditure that are excluded from the reports. These are:
- Salary payments to staff
- Pension contributions and National Insurance Contributions
- Severance payments
- Payments to individuals from legal process - compensation payments, legal settlements, fraud payments
- Money administered on behalf of a client
- Indemnity payments
- Bona vacantia
- Competition prizes - where a normal part of operations
- Expenditure on current military operations (including payments to contractors)
- Expenditure by secret service organizations, national security agencies or special forces, and tackling serious crime
- Transactions with foreign governments (if privileged under FOI)
- Settlements made with companies as part of an arbitration or legal process, which is conditional on confidentiality
- Potential betrayal of a commercial confidence, or prejudice to a legitimate commercial interest
- Spending where disclosure of either paying department or recipient would pose a personal security threat e.g. spending in fragile countries
- Civil List and payments to Royal Households
- Transactions relating to the financing or underwriting of debt e.g. purchase of credit default swaps
- Provisions or promises to pay not yet realised
- Any requests for more details about these items will be dealt with under freedom of information requests.
Where payments under £25,000 appear in a report, this will be either because once the VAT element is included the total is more than £25,000, or because an invoice for more than £25,000 has been broken down across different areas of expenditure.
This data is freely re-usable under the same terms as www.data.gov.uk recommend.
Important note about the format of the data.
We are publishing the data in CSV format to allow the data to be analysed or sorted.
However the CSV format uses a standard column width and not all entries may be completely visible. To view all the data, you will need to expand the columns. You can do this by selecting all the cells in the file (the grey box beside column A and above row 1), and then clicking on Format / Column / AutoFitSelection.
Using the CSV format will also allow you to combine reports from different months into larger spreadsheets if you wish to analyse longer periods.
The data
Click here to view the data from 1 April 2010 to 31 December 2011
Download the data for January 2012
Download the data for February 2012
Download the data for March 2012
Download the data for April 2012