[wdmmg-discuss] PESA and CRA and differences between.

Mon Jun 28 09:14:28 UTC 2010

This email from the CRA team goes some way to answering our questions 
about the CRA and PESA.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:01:29 +0100
To: Lisa Evans <lisa.evans at okfn.org>,
Subject: RE: PESA and CRA and differences between.

Hi Lisa

Unfortunately I can't install flashplayer on my computer so I'm unable to see you website properly. I should be able to still answer your questions though.

ENG_LA simply stands for English local authority spending. The problem you are facing with ENG_LA data is because we do not allocate sub-functions to local authority data by region. We only do this by country, i.e. England as a whole, for chapter 10. We believe that the regional data that we obtain isn't robust enough to also split it by sub-function. Some of the regional amounts by sub-function would be quite small and we do not think that the data quality enables us to carry out such low-level analyses.

In addition, we receive England LA data from CLG that is not organised along PO Groups unlike the rest of the data - one of the reasons why we do not allocate the regional data to sub-functions.

When refering to Housing, I assume you are looking only at spending that falls under 10.6 Social Protection/Housing and you exclude 6. Housing and community amenities in this?

I am not sure where the £3.097bn for the CRA come from exactly but I have attached a spreadsheet that uses the Chapter 10 interactive tables from our website. This shows that total CRA spending for 2008-09 on 10.6 is £19.7bn and that ENG_LA's share of this is £16.6bn. As I mentioned above, when you look a chapter 10, you will be able to analyse each country by sub-function. However, it is not possible to look at 10.6 by English region.

ENG_HRA is slightly different and easier to deal with. It refers to the Housing Revenue Account (so you could make this its PO Group name) and it's sub-function is 6.1 Housing development - of which: local authority housing.

I hope this makes sense but do let me know if any of this is unclear.

-----Original Message-----
From: Lisa Evans [mailto:lisa.evans at okfn.org]
Sent: 23 June 2010 10:53
Subject: PESA and CRA and differences between.

Dear [snip],

Since we last met, and you gave such help advice to my questions about the
CRA, the 'Where Does My Money Go?' team have built a visulisation for the
CRA:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dashboard/

to accompany the visulisation you saw for PESA:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/_prototype/

We don't expect the two diagrams above to be the same as the CRA shows
where money has had effect in different regions and the PESA report show
actual spending (or at least that is how I understand it, please correct
if that isn't the case).

However when we used the CRA data for the visulisation we included the
departments: ENG_HRA and ENG_LA and this has caused some problems because
neither the COFOG level 2 nor programme object group are provided for
these departments. To cope with this we have defined these spending lines
as "Unknown" bubbles (For example, underneath Education (82bn) there is a
44bn Unknown (for 2008/09 tax year)).

Could you advise how we could better deal with the ENG_HRA and ENG_LA
department's spending items, and why do they not have Programme Object
Group or COFOG level 2 descriptions?

A specific example of the problems the ENG_LA data in the CRA is causing
is in Housing:

Housing under the Social Protection bubble is 20bn in the PESA analysis
<for 2008-09; this can be viewed at
http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/_prototype/ >, and 3.097bn in the CRA
analysis
<http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dashboard/#/uk-bubble-chart/focus=10&year=2008-0>.
The difference, 17bn, is somewhere in the "Unknown" bubble, but this is
all the data marked as "LA data subfunction" in the CRA.

So you can see from this example that we can get some guidance from PESA
about how money has been allocated in the CRA, but we don't know for sure
if this is correct.

Looking forward to hearing your advice and I would be happy to visit you
again if you would like to explain in person or over the phone.

Many thanks,

Lisa Evans