FCO Exceptions to Spending Control Data Since 2010

Foreign and Commonwealth Office data lists items of spend allowed since the announcement of five cross-government moratoria on 24 May 2010. The moratoria cover ICT spend above £1m, Advertising & Marketing, consultancy, Property leases & lease extensions, and Civil Service recruitment. The dataset is provided in CSV and XLS formats under the OGL-UK-3.0 license.

Use Cases

• Analyze government spending patterns based on exceptions to moratoria mentioned in the description
• Monitor compliance with cross-government spending controls based on recorded exceptions
• Track expenditure on specific categories like ICT, consultancy, and advertising based on the listed moratoria

Strengths

• Data covers spending exceptions from a specific policy announcement date (24 May 2010).
• The dataset is associated with a specific government department (Foreign and Commonwealth Office).
• Available in two common tabular formats (CSV, XLS).

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Time Range

From 24 May 2010 onward

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:08.322965; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom (implied by source organization)