Everything Else
More than a quarter of all UK government spending — £348.9bn — sits in a single "everything else" category on our overview, because it's the residual left over once Health, Pensions, Welfare, Education, Debt interest, and Defence are all accounted for. That makes it the least transparent line on the chart by construction, even though it's the single largest category. Here's what's actually inside it.
How this actually works
This category is a residual, not a directly-reported PESA figure — it's what's left of total UK government spending (£1,323.8bn) once the six other named categories on our overview are subtracted out. HM Treasury's own PESA framework actually reports several distinct spending functions that fall inside this bucket, each with its own real budget: transport, housing and community amenities, public order and safety (policing, courts, prisons), recreation, culture and religion, environmental protection, and general public services (the cost of running government itself, including tax collection and international relations not already counted under Defence). We show it as one line because breaking all six out individually on the main overview chart would clutter it — but that trade-off means the single biggest category on the page is also the hardest one to actually understand at a glance.
What's actually in this category
The controversy
Because this category is defined as whatever's left over, its size can shift for reasons that have nothing to do with any of the six areas actually inside it — if the Health or Pensions figures are revised, the residual absorbs the difference even though nothing about transport or policing spending changed. This is worth bearing in mind whenever the size of "everything else" is cited in isolation: it's a useful summary number, but it's the least direct of any figure on this page, and genuinely large policy stories (a change to policing budgets, a transport funding row) can be hiding inside a total that barely moves.