Open sourcing public spending in CSV format is an excellent idea, and I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with a policy of the current government. In the past the details of how government departments spent public money was largely secret, and widely suspected to be subject to corruption. Perhaps it may have been possible to uncover some aspects of public accounts by visiting a library or making a freedom of information request, but few people - even professional journalists - would have bothered to go out of their way to do that, since you would need to have a good idea of what you were looking for in advance, and the information would have been at a high aggregated level rather than on an item by item basis.
This helps to close the loop on public accountability, allowing interested citizens to raise concerns if they find anything which looks excessive or inappropriate, or perhaps even to suggest alternative spending strategies which might deliver better value. Closed loop systems generally perform far better than open loop ones, and it's much harder to slide towards tyranny or become seriously out of step with public expectations if a balance of power exists between governors and the electorate.
However, I would like to see the transparency go further down to items of lower cost than £25,000, otherwise corrupt bureaucrats could simply make repeated payments of slightly less than this amount in order to remain under the radar of scrutiny. I'd also like to see publishing of spending details enshrined as a legal requirement for all future governments, rather than merely being just the policy of one particular administration.
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Of course it would be nice if ALL government spending accounts were published. On binding future governments? I believe it is a good thing this isn't actually possible.
Yes this should apply to all departments, with possible exceptions for secret services or military spending.
In terms of future governments it's absolutely possible that legislation could be passed requiring organizations spending public money to make their accounts available on the internet in an agreed standard format, like CSV. A future government could try to overturn this, but the electorate would eventually be able to pass verdict on this sort of behavior.
There is only one way this accountability can be reached -- when processes are automated and modernized to account for all the money that goes out of government. Projects like http://code.google.com/p/grantmaker can show the way.
Governments need an open source solution and methods to do this properly and inexpensively.
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