Some 6,777 grants with a total value of 2.5 billion euros from nine provinces in the Netherlands have been added to Subsidietrekker.nl.
After launching Subsidietrekker.nl with 21,850 grants provided by various central Dutch government departments, now 6,777 grants from provinces have been added. There are 463 private and unknown recipients. Brabant Lanscape (50) received the largest number of grants, followed by a number of municipalities such as Kampen (26), Raalte (24) and Deventer (22). Large grant amount recipients are transport companies such as Veolia, Arriva and Connexxion and various agencies that deal with the care of youths.
The data of three provinces, Zeeland, Drenthe and Flevoland are missing. The provinces of Zeeland and Drenthe do not publish a grant register. Since we want to track all subsidies for the year 2013 and Flevoland hadn’t publish its data on that year yet, it is not included in the Subsidietrekker.nl.
PDF is not open data
Unlike the Ministry of Finance and the grants provided by government departments, most regional authorities, apart from the provinces of Brabant and South Holland, publish grant registers as PDF files. These two provinces have published also the raw data in an Excel file.
Copyright?
The province of Overijssel initially told Open State Foundation that the information was ‘not intended for other organisations to publish, distribute or re-use’. This province even referred to its copyright disclaimer, eventhough Dutch law does not allow government agencies to enforce copyright on government information in principle. Also the provinces of Utrecht and Limburg publish their data in PDF since they still believe that third parties won’t be able to re-use data that is published as such. The province of Limburg notified Open State Foundation that information that is published on their website shall not be available in editable (or re-usable) formats.
6777 grants, 2.5 billion euros
In 2013, the province of Overijssel provided 1,377 grants, followed by the province of Gelderland with 1,069 grants. Limburg (890), Friesland (877), Noord-Holland (800), Zuid-Holland (659) and Brabant (648) provided fewer grants. The province of Noord-Holland reported on its website that contributions to memberships are not grants. Most provinces reported that the amounts may differ from the amounts that recipients actually received due to advance funding. Afterwards it may be that projects or activities cost less, then the amount is corrected.
Groningen and Utrecht
The provinces of Groningen (331) and Utrecht (149) publish not all grants. In the register of Groningen all structural subsidies BDU transport, rural areas development, youth, urban renewal and provincial co-financing are not included. The grant list of the province of Utrecht excludes all grants below 25,000 euros.