Improving the accessibility of government's data and information about the public finances

Many rather than one solution

The recent introduction of the new corporate IT systems in the Scottish Government has the potential to address some of the challenges we have found in the development of a fiscal portal solution. We have been sharing the lessons from the portal project with other parts of government engaged in the development of its corporate systems. It is hoped that in time a centralised operating model could support and service the needs of a portal, dashboard or other form of dynamic visualisation of fiscal information.

While we explored a fiscal portal, it was just one element of our commitment to improve the accessibility and usability of the government’s data and information about public finances in Scotland’s third National Action Plan. In the various other areas of our commitment we have sought to deepen the understanding of international best practice, as well as to improve the transparency of the information on the public finances.

• Through our work to improve the accessibility and understanding of the Scottish Budget we have sought to make this more understandable for more general users of our fiscal information. A review of international best practice for Citizen’s budgets has helped to improve the guide to the Budget, ‘Your Scotland, Your Finances’^[3], which has led to improvements in both its content and frequency of production – it is now updated throughout the fiscal cycle, including when Parliament agrees Budget revisions in-year.
• Government has also sought to support scrutiny of the Budget for more specialist users of its fiscal data and information introducing publication of spending by international best practice (the OECD’s Classification of Functions of Government) as well as publishing an increased level of information for the new draft Budget on its web pages^[4] and additional data required by stakeholders – to help with comparing and tracking changes over time. Work in this area has also led to improved baseline comparators for prior Budget years to help Parliament and stakeholders understand better how the new Budget compares to the latest in-year Budget.
• Lastly, there has been significant work to improve understanding of the impact of the Budget decisions on people, through the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement, and a new strategic integrated approach^[5] which improves transparency by making clearer both the impacts of spending decisions and the implications of constrained or reduced resources for disadvantaged groups.