What the spending registers hold, and what they show

The registers

Totals are the sums of the figures each register published, in the pounds of the year they were published in. They are not comparable between registers and a register’s total is not that part of public spending: the departmental returns exclude payments under £25,000, staff pay and benefit payments, and the grant registers hold only what each body chose to publish in the standard.

Payments over £25,000, by body

Every payment held here from each department’s own transparency returns. One register, one basis, so these figures compare.

A body publishes for the years it publishes: an absent year is a year not published here, not a year without payments. The years shown ignore 81 payments whose date the publisher mistyped — one is dated 0223, another 2414 — which are held as published but would otherwise be read as the span a body covers. Suppliers are counted by each department’s own spelling of the name, within that department only. A body’s total is not its procurement: the returns include transfers to other parts of government, which are among the largest lines in them — the largest single payment held here is £34bn recorded by the health department against HM Treasury as net parliamentary funding, its monthly grant to NHS England runs above £12bn, and £17bn went from the then business department to the Consolidated Fund.

UK official development assistance, by year

Net disbursement, the headline measure published in Statistics on International Development, in the pounds of each year.

Not adjusted for inflation, and not a share of national income. Aid delivered through multilateral bodies is recorded against those bodies rather than a country.

Where UK aid went in 2024

The fifteen largest recipients and the fifteen largest sectors in the latest published year, on the same net-disbursement basis. Recipients are as Statistics on International Development records them, which includes regional and unspecified lines as well as countries; sectors are DAC purpose categories.

The two columns are two separate rankings of the same year’s spending and are not related row by row. A project is counted against the sector its funder recorded it under, and a project split across sectors is published as several rows with the money already apportioned between them.

What this page does not show

Whether any of this money was well spent. These registers record what was awarded, disbursed or paid, and nothing about what was received for it. There is no measure of value here and no judgement of any body or supplier, and a large payment, a concentrated supplier or an organisation in several registers is none of those things by itself.

Nor is this all public spending. It is the part that these seven registers publish: payments over £25,000 by the bodies that publish them, grants published in the 360Giving standard, contract awards on the two national portals, and UK aid. Local government spending below those thresholds, NHS trusts, devolved administrations and most public bodies are not in it.

A small number of payments are counted twice. A body sometimes publishes overlapping periods — the Home Office covered April to 12 May 2010 in one file and May 2010 in another — so a payment in the overlap appears in both returns. 12,062 payments worth £2.6bn are repeated this way, 0.12% of the payments held and 0.05% of their value. They are left as published: a file covering the same month as another is not necessarily a repeat of it, because two bodies inside one department each publish their own return, and removing returns on the strength of their dates would discard real ones.

All findings · Sources · Methodology