The government is encouraging ‘armchair auditors’ to look at its figures The details behind all Whitehall spending over £25,000 made since the election are being published later.
About £80bn of expenditure – 195,000 lines of data – are being published online as part of what ministers call their “transparency agenda”.
Early analysis by the BBC shows the private firm receiving the most public money is the outsourcing firm Capita, which received £3.3bn.
But critics warns that the numbers are almost meaningless without context.
The government says thousands of data entries will be published to allow developers, organisations and companies to “reuse and reinterpret” it.
People are being encouraged to pick through the enormous quantity of online data to spot waste and hold ministers to account.
Cheque for Charles
All spending of more than £25,000 made between May and September will be published – although some departments will also publish spending over £500.
Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude said: “When you open up the books, let people start to do some auditing of their own, I think there will be a great deal of pressure on government to use money, other people’s money, much more carefully and be prepared to answer questions more.”
“The data isn’t as good as it should be and not as good as it will be going forward”
Francis Maude Cabinet Office Minister
Early analysis of the data by the BBC shows Capita was the biggest private sector recipient of taxpayers’ money – and that Prince Charles got a cheque from the Ministry of Justice for £667,000 – rent for Dartmoor prison, which is on his land. He was also paid £677,000 by the Army for access to Dartmoor.
Among other private companies that receive large amounts of public money are the property company Trillium and technology giant Hewlett Packard, which have each received about £285m since the election. Accountants KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers were each paid £22.5m for government contracts between May and September.
The government’s car service also received payments totalling almost £1.5m from departments, including £123,000 from the Department of Energy and Climate Change for “ministerial support”.
Among the smaller sums detailed by some departments are a payment of £1,000 from the Department of Business to a company that sells jewel encrusted dog collars and pet fashion accessories to help it expand into the US.
But BBC home editor Mark Easton said some data given to journalists before the public launch had later been removed from public view – pre-released figures seen by the BBC showed the Ministry of Justice paid eight people a total of £2.2m compensation for miscarriages of justice – among them two businessmen caught up in the Arms to Iraq scandal in the 1990s.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said the information had been removed for data protection reasons.
Mr Maude said: “The data isn’t as good as it should be and not as good as it will be going forward. Certainly, a lot of the systems in place don’t disclose, with anything like the precision that people are entitled to expect, what the money is being spent on.”
It is the latest in a series of online publications of data. Last month the government published the salaries of thousands of civil servants, naming individuals earning more than £82,900 for the first time. And in June it published the Coins database of public spending data.
Mark Easton said it was part of the government’s plan to abolish professional Whitehall scrutineers like the Audit Commission and replace them with an “army of armchair auditors”.
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