[wdmmg-discuss] super easy way to let us know about spending cuts

Thu Aug 19 14:47:14 UTC 2010

I agree with all of this Rufus. Thank you for defining the tasks nicely.

I'll just add a few sentences about the reasoning behind capturing the 
spending cuts.

I was asked a very good question the other day: "If the Treasury announce 
the spending cuts, then isn't that announcement enough to tell you all 
about the cuts?"

The answer is that when the Treasury announce a round of cuts, they define 
the cuts in two ways:
1. they name some specific programmes they will cut. This is enough
    information.
2. they also announce departments that will need to reduce their budget by
    a defined amount. This is not enough information, as it isn't always
    clear what the consequences of the all the departmental budget cuts
    will be.

The May budget announcement is an example of this:

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press_04_10.htm
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/press_04_10.pdf

The Guardian put together a spreadsheet of this announcement. 
In this spreadsheet have also been answering this exact question about the 
consequences of departmental cuts, see the 'cuts by department' tab:

https://spreadsheets4.google.com/ccc?key=tAfsbLETVcHZaX6T071a_yg#gid=0

So the way to get the consequences of cuts is to watch the department 
announcements, to see how they are going to meet their new budget.

Pasting a link to these announcements into our form will help to complete 
the picture of the cuts.

The Audit Commision last week is another good example of the kind of cut 
we are interested in.

So if you keep an eye on the news then please keep in mind our form if you 
see a cut, it is just a matter of pasting a link here:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/submit/

Many thanks,

Lisa

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> @Tony: this is a mini-project in WDMMG where your super-gdocs skills
> would be amazingly useful and put to good use ...
>
> Right now (correct me if I'm wrong Lisa!) we need help:
>
>  * Merge/compare all the different sources of cuts data including our
> own together  (currently spread around various different google docs
> and lists)
>  * Compare with some of the suggested cuts of e.g. Tax Payers
> Alliance and IFS (see Lisa's comments below)
>  * Do some visualization!
>  * Get a workflow about cleaning and processing the data we get in
>
> On 17 August 2010 09:40, Lisa Evans <lisa.evans at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I've changed the way you can let us know about a spending cut.
>>
>> It's really easy now, you just need to paste in the url of a place the cut
>> is reported ... and that's it!
>>
>> http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/submit/
>
> This is great Lisa. I've taken the liberty of making a couple of mods:
>
> a) add amount field (still have only 3 fields total) and many people
> could put this.
> b) Put all items on 1 page (you only have 3 fields!)
> c) Reworked help text
>
> Regards,
>
> Rufus
>
>> You can add more details about the cut on the next page of the form, but it
>> is not required as we will do the rest.
>>
>>
>> Also I made a spreadsheet of all the Tax Payers Allience proposed £50
>> billion spending cuts:
>>
>> https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AhkFVPcNaYlxdDdjSlUxeUh0RjNHSUY3OC1EYnQwZ3c&hl=en&authkey=CMuO6_kJ
>>
>> Would be really interested to see how these suggested cuts compare with,
>> what is happening in reality and also the suggested cuts of, say, the IFS.
>>
>> Contact me if you want to help with those comparisons.
>>
>>
>>
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>
>