[wdmmg-discuss] £495bn vs £700bn

Wed Aug 18 22:02:35 UTC 2010

This looks like (slightly) less of a problem with CRA 2010. See below.

2010/7/29 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
> 2010/7/28 Liz Turner <liz at iconomical.com>:
>> On Jul 28, 2010, at 6:14 PM, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>>
>> 2. Data for 2010-2011 and possibly 2009-2010 (which are projection
>> data for our data) is clearly missing a massive chunk of spending
>> (this is missing in source CRA data). With a bit of examination you
>> can clearly see this due to Local Authority info being completely
>> absent (they don't do projections it seems)
>>
>> For me item 2 is a really big issue. We've discussed various options:
>>
>> 1. Remove these years from dashboard (or system entirely)
>> 2. Put a clear annotation on the dashboard (how?)
>> 3. Correct the data as best we can
>>
>> Very important to fix this. As a minimum, we should mark a clear cut-off in
>
> Completely agree. I think I discussed this Dave quite a while ago,
> especially idea of limiting time period show (so as to remove the
> 'bad' data).

CRA 2010 contains LA spending data for 2009-10, and no projections for
2011-12, so there's now only one year missing. Here are the new
aggregates (£m):

2003-2004 470804.22	
2005-2006 501062.86	
2006-2007 522909.07	
2007-2008 555653.11	
2008-2009 602354.67	
2009-2010 644047.52	
2010-2011 501876.22 (no LA items)

>> the visualizationat the point from which the data is obviously incomplete.
>> A good visual cue would be to make incomplete years look deliberately
>> inaccurate, with fuzzy lines, or otherwise indicating deviations from
>> expectations.
>
> We certainly want a way to clearly indicate:
?
> A. Data that is (probably) erroneous
> B. Estimated/ballpark data

Could we simply make all the spending bubbles for 2010-11 fuzzier, so
there's an instant visual contrast for that year? Presumably all
2010-11 spending items are by nature estimates anyway?

We could also add our own estimates for LA items, holding them
constant as a proportion of total spending.

If iconomical can think of a beautiful way to indicate the
government's estimates, and our own, then that would be great.