Christmas Day for Geeks - the COINS database drops

Bah! Just my luck - the government has decided to unveil the most fun toy in the universe in the middle of my accursed exams. For the uninitiated, the COINS database is the raw data of all the UK Government's spending. So what, I hear you ask? Well, if you're sane, it means nothing at all. If, on the other hand, you are a big-government hating geek with a raw data fetish, it's sort of like being given a hoverboard from Back to the Future II the week before your GCSEs. It's impossibly cool, but it would require a lot of time to get into in any sort of depth, and I really don't have time at the minute. D'oh!

By way of a teaser, though, I have done a bit of analysis on bad debts. Ok, ok, that sounds as exciting as a dank February weekend getaway to Larne, but hear me out. The Guardian have a dataset of all projected (final figures later in the year) Government spending for the tax year 2009-10. A particular interesting nugget of data is the projected losses on bad debts. I had a hunch that the local government geniuses might have a habit of lending money to people who then don't repay it, and I wasn't disappointed.

Bad debts for the whole of the UK government amounted to £659.2m last year. Sounds like a lot, but without comparable figures for previous years, who really knows. Of this, £313.7m was due to defaults on Student loans in Great Britain, and £10m for similar causes in Scotland. Exclude these from the total, and ignore the negative "bad debts" from HMRC and the Cabinet Offices, where bad debts from previous years were reversed. Total bad debts for the UK Government excluding reversals and student loans were therefore £364.9m. Guess who makes up a disproportionate amount of these bad debts? Why, the Northern Ireland Executive, of course! Observe...

Yup, the Northern Ireland Executive have have tossed away £17.9m in bad debt, more than the Ministry of Defence, and not much less than the entire NHS. Quite an achievement! A couple of tiddlers (such as Scotland's £10,000) have been removed for clarity. Even more interesting is when you drill down to the particulars of the bad debt. The debt is listed as PIX S175011 Sickness, which I believe is "of which: incapacity, disability and injury benefits". The most likely cause of this, surely, is bad debts from overpayments of DLA and the like. Which means that some bright sparks have doled out £17.9m too much to our class of richly deserving benefit recipients, and then not bothered or haven't been able to get it back. Fantastic!

I can see a lot of fun being had in the future with this data. Much obliged, Messrs Cameron and Clegg.