On the platform openspending.nl the financial details of Utrecht, The Hague and Enschede are available today. After unlocking financial data of Amsterdam, including all its boroughs last month, the financial spending data of these three cities are now added.
The data show that there are large differences in the spending patterns of large cities. For example, the Hague spends more on social benefits and items related to unemployment and Utrecht spends per household more on primary education. The parking revenues per km2 in The Hague almost twice as many as in Utrecht. Amsterdam is a leader in the field of parking revenues.
It also shows that cities such as Amsterdam and Utrecht have large land development posts. This is particularly noticeable among the feature spatial planning and housing, where land development in The Hague amounts to `¬ 624 per household but in Utrecht, this is `¬1996 and `¬ 2204 euros in Amsterdam.
In Enschede, although we see that land development is heavier on the balance sheet than in The Hague, it decreases from `¬ 1,680.77 to `¬1,085.69 per household. This is also the biggest cause of spending less in 2013 than in 2012.
With openspending.nl, Open State Foundation makes it possible to unlock spending data and makes financial data of local governments in the Netherlands comparable. Open State has started to contact all municipalities and other local governments to disclose their financial data. The platform not only allows comparisons between actual expenditures of different districts but also allows seeing whether interim expenditures are in line with their original budgets.
Although the cities of Utrecht and The Hague have unlocked their quarterly and annual spending data, the budgets are not visible in the platform. These municipalities do not specify their budget data. Under current legislation local governments are not obliged to do this. The totals of the 2014 budgets of the city of Utrecht and the city of The Hague can be seen in the treemap below:
Amounts are x1000. Data is arrives from the IV3-datafiles with the 2014 budgets of the municipality of Utrecht (zip) and The Hague (xlxs)