HMG Spending

Just thought I'd join everyone else and have a little play with the published HMG departmental spending information. In particular I looked at DECC, given that indirectly they paid much of my EST salary.

As most of the commentators have said - it's all pretty useless without some sort of context. Indeed a cursory look at the DECC numbers rather triggered a desire to yawn but there are one of two things that make one stop and think. I looked a bit more closely at the September spend (DECC publish items down to £500). In that month alone there was an outlay of £323,330 on hire of agency staff. Now, there's little indication of the grade of hirees but it looks like a fair number of bums on seats to me.

Then there are some interesting inter-departmental transfer charges. For instance some £9,692,000 was paid in grants to BIS in September. Now what's all that about? Defra received £222,063 for "minor works".

But the one that really caught my eye was £2,350 of professional subscriptions to Stonewall. Really?