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How is your tax pound spent?

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-02-18 05:56:12 - Graham Ellis

Where does the UK Government Spend your Money? What proportion goes on Defence, on Pensions, or Foreign Aid, on Economic Development, and on Health? Is the same amount spent for each person in the South West as in London and in Scotland?

If you can answer these questions I'll be very impressed ... as I was impressed when one of my delegates pointed me to the "Where does my Money Go" web site. I'm even more impressed and thankful that I'm allowed to cut and paste a graphic or two from these under the Creative Commons license

Here - looking at my own area of interest which is economic development and transport - is a histogram showing expenditure by the government per head of population in the latest reported year (2008-9) on Enterprise and Economic affairs (purple), Science and Technology (Green) and Transport (Cyan).

You're only seeing half the story here - the expenditure. Government income isn't included, and it does get considerable funding from road and vehicle taxes, from rail franchise payments, etc, so it's perhaps not unreasonable for there to be high expenditure in that sector. But surely the tax paid per capita / in the transport area is fairly even (higher in the rural areas - more miles traveled?) so why is the expenditure on each citizen so much lower in some of these areas?

Is there any linkage between a high transport expenditure on each person in London and the fact that the nations transport is run from there? With satellite transport operations based in Edinburgh and Cardiff ...



See also [earlier article] where I looked at where government income came from, and what proportion of it went in various major categories.