How would you spend £691.67bn? That is total spending by the British government for the financial year which ended this March. It's up by 0.3% on the year before if you take inflation into account.

That might sound like an increase. But, for the first time, the data has shown the scale of the cuts hitting government departments in the coalition's first year.

The cuts across departments appear to equal at least £24.9bn in slashed spending to individual government programmes and agencies. Worse is yet to come for Whitehall - with cuts of up to 30% per department coming down the pipeline.

Only 15 out of 54 government departments and major agencies surveyed received no cut.

Thanks to Guardian graphic artist Jenny Ridley, we can see how that spending fits together - and how anything less than a billion is really not that much in government terms - particularly compared to a budget deficit of £110bn for 2010/11.

The biggest departmental cut is for the Department for Transport - which is down over 15%, including inflation, to £12.3bn. That is followed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which has been hit by a 13.4% cut, including inflation, and the Home Office, which is down 7.69%

But, hefty as those cuts are, the research reveals for the first time, the scale of reductions to individual programmes within government. Of 304 specific items of spending identified by the Guardian's data analysis, 201 have been cut - to an average of 17.4%

This is the most comprehensive atlas of public spending available, put together by us with the help of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Each year every government department publishes an annual report which includes detailed breakdowns of spending. These are what we have gone through to get the key numbers for you. [If you want to do it yourself, there's a little guide to how to find it at the bottom of this article.]

Included in the worst cuts to major programmes are (including inflation):

• School meals, DFE, -55.1% to £6m

• Rail, DFT, -41% to £2.98bn

• Neighbourhoods, DCLG, -38.45% to £6bn

• Children & families, DFE, -31% to £2bn

• Low carbon UK, DECC, -29.1% to £623m

• Climate change, Defra, -23.2% to £18m

• Roads, Transport, -18.2% to £3.8bn

• Further Education, DFE, -16% to £4.7bn

• Sport, DCMS, -12.3% to £121m

• Coastguard, DFT, -11% to £132m

• BBC, DCMS, -8.69% to £2.955bn

• British Council, FCO, -8.7% to £189m

• Natural History Museum, DCMS, -8% to £49m

• British Museum, DCMS, -7% to £46m

At the same time, benefit spending look set to rise with other programmes which received big real-term increases, including:

• Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, DECC, +81% to £7bn

• Academies, DFE, +58.8% to £2.08bn

• Defence equipment spending, MoD, +31.7% to £22.77bn

• Ceremonial spending, DCMS, +25% to £25m

• Debt relief, DFID, +24% to £66m

• Incapacity benefit, DWP, +13% to £7.8bn

• Criminal legal aid, +8% to £1.2bn

• Housing benefit, +5% to £21.6bn

There are, of course, some hefty caveats. The large cuts in investment spending in part reflect that Labour brought some capital spending forward from 2010-11 into 2009-10. PBR 2008 figures suggest this reallocation would on its own have accounted for a £5.5bn drop in (cash) investment spending between 2009-10 and 2010-11. Roughly £5bn of in-year cuts was announced by the coalition government in May last year. A reasonably large part of the rise in benefits spending is simply accounted for by the fact that benefits are increased each year in line with CPI/average earnings, so even if there were no increase in claimants the amount spent would go up. In particular, state pension spending increased by £3bn in cash terms.

The full data is below. What can you do with it?

The first thing to do is to find each department's annual resource accounts, which come out in July each year. They give you the figures you want, just not in the format you need. Government departmental spending is split into four parts:

• Departmental Expenditure limits (DEL) - capital

• Departmental Expenditure limits (DEL) - resource

• Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) - capital

• Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) - resource

Add those four together and you get the department's total spending - in most of the resource accounts, this is table 1 of the core tables, always labelled Total Departmental Spending. Most of them now sum up the department's totals but not the totals for individual projects. So, you need to add together those four numbers, the resource and capital DEL and AME figures for each project.

We should point out that the new departmental resource accounts - designed to be read by accountants, as opposed to the general public, have made this process harder. See my name and shame guide to the worst government departmental reports here.

When you get the two figures, you may want to work out the %-change including inflation - which makes small increases effectively a cut in spending. Thanks to the IFS' Gemma Tetlow, here's how to do it:

Inflation-adjusted changes are calculated by deflating the cash spending figures by the change in the GDP deflator, which is available from HM Treasury. GDP deflator growth between 2009-10 and 2010-11 was 2.97%. So, as an example: If spending on Department X in 2009-10 was £100bn… … and spending on Department X in 2010-11 was £120bn... …then the inflation-adjusted spending figure for 2010-11 is: 120/1.0297 = £116.54 (i.e. in 2009-10 prices) ...and the "real growth" in Department X spending between 2009-10 and 2010-11 is: 100*(120/(100*1.0297)-1) = 16.5% growth.

How government departments compare

Government spending by department, 2010/11 Click heading to sort table. Download this data DEPARTMENT 2009/10, £bn 2010/11, £bn % change including inflation TOTAL EXPENDITURE 669.44 691.67 0.34 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) 155.28 160.18 0.18 Department of Health (DH) 102.28 105.6 0.28 Department for Education 56.8 58.34 -0.24 HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) 44.95 45.78 -1.09 Debt interest payments 31.3 43.9 36.21 Ministry of Defence (MoD) 39.09 39.46 -1.95 Communities and Local Government (CLG) 39.73 37.83 -7.51 DEVOLVED SPENDING SCOTLAND 32.9 34.88 2.95 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 26.39 24.04 -11.52 DEVOLVED SPENDING WALES 16.04 15.87 -3.92 Department for Transport (DfT) 14.65 12.32 -18.33 Home Office (HO) 10.99 10.45 -7.69 Ministry of Justice (MoJ) 9.1 9.46 1 DEVOLVED SPENDING NORTHERN IRELAND 8.97 9.05 -2.01 Department of Energy and Climate Change 3.18 8.06 146.02 Department for International Development (DfID) 6.63 7.69 12.65 Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) 6.87 7.02 -0.72 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) 3.08 2.69 -15.22 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 2.26 2.26 -2.97 Security and intelligence services 1.83 1.91 1.33 HM Treasury (exc financial stability) 0.17 1.68 870 Office of Gas and Electricity Markets/Gas and Electricity Markets Authority (OFGEM) 0.48 0.7 40.14 Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) 0.67 0.61 -11.53 Cabinet Office (CO) 0.6 0.57 -7.47 UK Statistics Authority 0.22 0.3 36.23 National School of Government (NSG) 0.03 0.23 Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) 0.2 0.18 -12.46 Health Protection Agency 0.23 0.18 -25.1 House of Commons 1.66 0.16 National Savings and Investments 0.16 0.16 -1.14 Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority 0 0.13 Office of Communications (Ofcomm) from government funding (rest from license fees) 0.14 0.12 -13.14 UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) 0.1 0.08 -12.54 House of Lords 0.1 0.08 -22.27 Food Standards Agency 0.12 0.07 -41.74 National Audit Office 0.06 0.07 7.91 Office of Fair Trading (OFT) 0.06 0.06 -9.16 Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office (RCPO) 0.04 0.05 -1.09 Northern Ireland Office (NIO) 0.04 0.04 0.86 Serious Fraud Office (SFO) 0.04 0.04 -12.45 Charity Commission for England and Wales 0.03 0.03 -4.56 Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) 0.03 0.03 -11.03 Electoral Commission 0.02 0.02 -2.21 Government Actuary's Department (GAD) 0.02 0.02 17.39 Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) 0.02 0.02 -3.4 Postal Services Commission (Postcomm) 0.01 0.01 -2.06 Scotland Office (SO) 0.01 0.01 -5.87 Wales Office (WO) 0.01 0 -12.13 Attorney General's Office (see also LSLO) 0 0 -8.71 HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate 0 0 -27.7 Office for Budget Responsibility 0 Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission 0 0 -4 Treasury Solicitors' Department 0 0

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