This repository covers the ESPRESSO project - the datasets, lookups and tool for exploring tax and public sector expenditure in local areas.
ESPRESSO is a backronym. It stands for Estimated and Simplified Public Revenue and Expenditure Standardised Statistical Output.
In 2012/12, the New Economy research team pulled together an analysis of total tax take and total public sector expenditure in Greater Manchester. This included an analysis at a district level, and numerous interviews and discussions with heads of finance at several public sector organisations.
The aim of this work was to understand the comparative position of Greater Manchester, and whether it was a net contributor or net recipient of Treasury funding. In turn, this analysis helped to provide evidence to support devolution with a fiscal focus - to have greater responsibility over the way public sector finances are spent in Greater Manchester, with an overall aim of reducing the disparity between tax generated and public sector expenditure.
This analysis was repeated in subsequent years to show how the position has changed since 2008/09.
In 2014/15, the Local Government Association commissioned New Economy to help identify the routes through to devolution. This included an analysis of best practice, using primarily Greater Manchester's experience to identify the steps required to work through to devolution discussions with Government.
A significant part of this work included an expansion of the tax and spend analysis to cover the entire UK. It was felt that the feasibility of taking the same approach nationally would be very difficult, and so a different approach was created. This new approach amalgamated a range of data from multiple sources to create a single, consistent view across all local authority areas in the UK. Where possible, national datasets were used to identify expenditure and tax, and consistent disaggregation methodologies were applied.
This work was then labelled as ESPRESSO - a backronym now taken to mean 'Estimated and Simplified Public Revenue and Expenditure Standardised Statistical Output'.
Following a further request to update the data, between 2018 and 2020, GMCA Research updated the ESPRESSO data with information from 2015-16 to 2017-18.
A tool was created in Tableau, and a dataset developed. Further updates will need to take account of the detailed methodology; variant datasets and sources; and potential improvements / updates to the final ESPRESSO dataset.
The datasets within are opened under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The licence for this project is noted as CC-BY 4.0, which is compatible with the OGL v3. The licence for the project is here.