The Charity Commission data sets on how charities spend their money will be made publicly available in an ‘open data’ format by March 2014.

Data on how charities with an income over £500,000 allocated their revenues across fundraising, governance and charitable activities and what they retain for future use is held by the Commission as well as headline income and expenditure figures for all registered charities.

Making the data available will enable technology developers to create applications that will let citizens utilise and understand the data, said the Cabinet Office announcing the release.

The data release is part of the government’s wider open data policy and Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, who made the announcement last week said: “The data commitments we are announcing today will strengthen the hand of citizens in holding commercial and charitable organisations to account. They will also support growth and the creation of data-led businesses in the new information economy – helping the UK compete in the global race.”

He also announced that HMRC was considering how to release part of the VAT register and that the Land Registry confirmed it is to publish historical Price Paid Data (PPD) in CSV format as linked data from July.