Country and Regional Analyses (CRA) - UK Government Finances

The CRA is a data set produced annually by the HM Treasury.
The data is produced by each government department and collected by the Treasury in February.
Each government department has to determine which parts of the country have benefited from spending in its different programs (Program Object Groups -- POGs).
Each department defines their own POGs and the Treasury require that the departments fit their POGS under COFOG functions.

So, in summary the CRA data shows where in the country benefit has been had from the spending of each government department.

The data forms part of the Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) which is part of data.gov.uk's more liberal Crown Copyright license.

The data required from each Government Department for the CRA

All UK departments are asked to provide a breakdown of their expenditure on services by country/region, covering the latest five outturn years, and projections forward for 2 years.

These data are combined with (a) estimates of local authority spending by region from Communities and Local Government and the devolved administrations, (b) data on spending by the devolved administrations and other departments with a single territory jurisdiction, to provide a full analysis of identifiable spending by country and region for UK public expenditure.[1]

In order to reduce the compliance costs for departments, HM Treasury does not insist that departments undertake a separate regional breakdown for their smallest program object groups. However, in order to maintain the quality of the regional figures departments the Treasury asks that at the minimum departments individually establish the regional breakdown of:

• at least 95% of the overall total of net expenditure on all program object groups
• all individual program object groups, split by capital and current expenditure, with an expenditure of £20m (either positive or negative) or more in any year.[2]

[1] From section 1.2 of http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/cra_guidance_annexb.pdf
[2] From section 7 of http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/cra_guidance_annexb.pdf