About GERS and this site

What GERS is

An interactive Data tool which allows users to surf the data published in the Scottish Government's annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Statistics (GERS) reports.

Starting with a high level overview of Scotland's fiscal position since 1998, users can: drill down into revenue and expenditure line level detail; understand which elements are reserved vs devolved responsibilities; read clear descriptions of what each line includes; toggle between nominal or real £m, £ per capita or percent of GDP terms; compare Scotland to the UK average or rest of UK (rUK). An audit-trail is provided sourcing every number back to specific cells within the GERS source tables.

The Graphs and Insights sections will draw on this data and highlight the most important messages which emerge.

How it is produced

The app parses three official publications: the main GERS tables (62 sheets), the CRA expenditure database (~14,000 rows), and the HMT GDP deflator index. Every value is stored with full provenance (the exact file, sheet, row, and column it came from). The data is then exported as static JSON and rendered in a React frontend. There is no server at runtime; the entire app runs in your browser. The explanations of what is included within each line item (as revealed by hover/tap on the info icons) have been compiled by researching GERS reports past and present, along with their associated revenue and expenditure methodology papers.

Context

The GERS figures are hotly debated every year, particularly in the context of the ongoing Scottish independence debate. The GERS report itself is a rather dry, static pdf and the published spreadsheets are dense, inflexible and hard to navigate. Perhaps as a result, politicians and commentators alike often make misleading or false assertions about what the GERS data show; confusion and misinformation abound. This tool has been created by These Islands in the hope that making the data more accessible will improve public understanding and elevate the fiscal debate.

Can the figures be trusted?

The GERS figures are published by the Scottish Government and compiled by the Scottish Government's own team of statisticians and economists using methodologies and assumptions they have chosen following years of extensive consultation.

The GERS report is an accredited National Statistics publication, meaning it is assessed by the UK Statistics Authority to ensure it meets the standards set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. To quote the Scottish Government’s own white paper on independence (Scotland’s Future): "GERS is the authoritative publication on Scotland’s public finances"

Myths

Any suggestions that the Scottish Government’s own economists and statisticians have – either through incompetence or by design – materially understated the true scale of the revenues generated by Scotland’s economy or overstated the amount of public spending which Scotland benefits from do not deserve to be taken seriously.

To address the most common attempts to deny the GERS figures (most of which are now addressed in the GERS FAQs):

• The GERS report is not something forced on Scotland by Westminster: the decision to publish lies with the Scottish Government’s Chief Statistician and the report is compiled entirely independently of UK central government departments as explained in [this FOI response]
• As with all economic statistics, some estimates are required. Most of the estimates relate to revenue allocations which rely on survey data. The GERS report includes standard statistical analysis which provides 95% confidence intervals around these estimates. The estimates could be wrong in either direction, but we can be statistically 95% confident that they are accurate to +/- £1.0 billion (within the context of a GERS deficit of well over £20 billion in recent years)

To suggest that the team in St Andrew’s House who compile these figures, after decades of working on them and multiple user consultations, have somehow missed whole revenue streams that should be attributed to Scotland is simply not credible. For the avoidance of doubt:

• The UK does not have any export taxes (so how exports are measured has no impact on these fiscal accounts)
• Whisky duty is a consumption tax and appropriately treated as such (Scotland has no more claim on VAT and duty on whisky paid by consumers in England than it has on that paid in France by consumers there)
• Corporate head-office location is not used to allocate any tax revenue.
• The geographical share of North Sea revenue used in GERS is based on the median line principle (as employed in 1999 to determine the boundary between Scotland and the rest of the UK for fishery demarcation purposes). Production, costs and revenues are allocated on a field-by-field basis to either the rest of the UK or Scotland (there is no unaccounted for “unknown region” data in this analysis). The net result is that in GERS Scotland has been allocated ~90% of the UK’s North Sea revenues over the last decade (in some years >100% due to petroleum revenue tax rebates related to decommissioning activity being mostly in “rest of the UK” waters)
• Scotland is not allocated any spending relating to infrastructure investments outside Scotland – so for example projects like HS2 and Crossrail have no impact on the GERS deficit.