UK Government Spending Treemap

Inspired by David McCandless’ TED talk (the beauty of data visualization), I decided to try to visualise government spending in a useful way. This is particularly relevant given the current worry over state spending on benefits. Happily the Guardian have collected all the data, otherwise this would probably have been impossible (given the amount of time I wanted to spend on it).

In the visualisation below the budgets of different departments have been sub-divided into different spending categories. There are no real surprises, but I found it interesting how small the budgets of departments like Ministry of Justice and Department for Transport were when compared to the Department of Work & Pensions and the Department of Health. Also, spending on the state pension vastly outweighs other DWP spending on things like housing benefit.

UK government spending treemap

The visualisation was created using the treemap package in R. Code and data are both available publicly on github: https://github.com/nickmalleson/Govt_Spending