Improving the accessibility of government's data and information about the public finances
This report shares lessons learned from Scotland's work to improve public finance transparency, including trialling a fiscal portal, enhancing budget accessibility, and identifying what's needed to make fiscal data more open and reusable for all.
The development of a fiscal portal
In 2022 we established a project to explore the potential of a fiscal portal service. In January to March of 2023, the Project’s alpha phase provided an initial prototype portal, using published infrastructure investment programme data to build a live prototype of the service in order to test a number of assumptions and to understand the potential for the platform to deliver against our goals. The prototype confirmed the value in presenting raw data in dynamic visualisations. This work also identified problems with scaling this level of spend across government due to the quality and limitations of the data and its consistency. It also identified limitations in terms of connecting data on spending with data on procurement and contracts.
Moving to the Project’s beta phase later in 2023 allowed the exploration, in much greater detail, of the Scottish Government’s Budget data in its various reporting formats. This included the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) international standard of Classification of Functions of Government which standardises reporting formats to help track changes over time. The result was a Minimum Viable Product fiscal portal using current Scottish Budget data in the fourth quarter of 2024. Internal and external stakeholders noted the benefit of information being presented in such a visual way, having the ability to compare areas over time and drill down into areas for further detail. The beta phase also enabled the practicalities of data supply to be considered in more detail, as well as how the presentation of the various versions of the budget data might be made more understandable.