Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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Question 103: To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform when the work on making the Estimates available on-line in searchable form was begun; and the regularity with which he intends updating same. [20284/11]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The Estimates of Expenditure data have been prepared in electronic form within my Department for a number of years and, I understand, that work on preparing this data on a searchable time-series basis for internal use has been progressing for the past 2 or 3 years in particular. However, the decision to make all of this data accessible to the public was taken soon after the establishment of the new Department of Public Expenditure & Reform.

In the first instance, a searchable spreadsheet version of the indicative 2011 Revised Estimates was published as part of the launch of my Department's website in early May 2011. It is my intention that all Revised Estimates Volumes from this point on will be made available in such a format shortly after their publication. Moreover, a new "Databank" web page was made publicly available in June 2011, following a couple of months of technical development of the internal data. The Databank - available at http://databank.per.gov.ie/ - gives full information on gross and net voted expenditure, together with expenditure for the Social Insurance Fund (SIF) and the National Training Fund (NTF), back to 1994 broken down by individual Department and vote. Work is currently underway to make all of the subhead level detail within each Vote available on the Databank over the coming weeks.

I should emphasise that this is the beginning, and not the end, of the process of making this type of information available to the public. Over time, my Department will put all appropriate information in the hands of the public via the new Databank.