Taxes

I noticed this year that on the HMRC personal tax portal they give you a breakdown of how your tax is spent on various services.

This is offered as raw data but also a pretty graph.

Tax breakdown from HMRC 2018-2019
Tax breakdown from HMRC 2018-2019

They also provide the data for the past 4 years, so I thought it would be interesting to track some of these categories to see how government spending has changed from 2016 to 2019.

how spending has changed 2016-2019
Spending Changes over 2016-2019

The graph line shows it best but in actual fact the changes in percentage are very small. The biggest changes are in Welfare (down) and Business & Industry (up).

If you do a personal tax return, this data is available in the online HMRC tax portal. Sign in, then select Self Assessment and then select ‘find out how your tax is spent’.