[wdmmg-discuss] CRA 2010: description and questions

Thu Aug 12 11:52:46 UTC 2010

thanks guys. so just so I'm clear:

> The 2009 CRA database dump is:
> - the data behind PESA table 9
> and
> - the data behind PESA table 10
> joined together badly with lots of mistakes in it.

By '2009 CRA database dump' you mean the CSV file hosted on the
Treasury site, and used by the bitbucket package, right?
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/cra_2009_db.csv

I wonder why it's not linked to from anywhere on the Treasury site,
including the official PESA 2009 pages.

> We wrote scripts to make the data sensible.
>
> This year the Treasury have given us two well defined data sets:
> - one for the data behind PESA table 9
> and
> - one for the data behind PESA table 10.

These data sets are also available in 2009 - would you just have faced
the same problems as with the data dump? or were they not available
when you started work? http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/pespub_pesa09.htm

> We can join the data together ourselves in a controlled and well defined
> way.

Ahh! I'm starting to see how we might do this. We can use POG IDs,
because these are in both spreadsheets, conveniently.

So if you filter the 'POG Alias' column by e.g. "P08 S081305 Fire
Superannuation" (fire service pensions, presumably), then in Table 9
you see nine rows with spending in 2009-10, one for each region,
classified as e.g. England > East Midlands > Social protection.

And conveniently, if you do the same in Table 10, you see nine rows
with the same sums, all of which are classified as England > Social
protection > Old age (I assumed they would have collapsed all the
regions into a single row for England, but not so).

We can merge them together - well, assuming that they are consistent anyway.

Lisa, is this what you had in mind all along? You were one step ahead of me :)

> (Alistair, the 2009 CRA database dump is not a one off either, we have
> database dumps for every year going back to 2005).

Did these all come out as part of the same FOI request?