It ain’t pretty. But there’s also politics at play.
Rachel Reeves gave a statement to the House of Commons on what the government calls the “spending inheritance” (writes Fraser of Allander Institute’s JOAO SOUSA).
It’s important to make clear what this is and isn’t about. If you hear people saying that this is all to do with fiscal rules, that’s incorrect. We have highlighted many problems with them, but this statement is all to do with this year’s public finances, meaning 2024-25 – all the fiscal rules will apply to 2029-30, although there will be some knock-on effects into future years from these decisions.
Ultimately, this is only a partial fiscal statement – setting the scene for the Budget, the date of which has been announced for 30 October. It is a welcome return to normality in that there will be more than 10 weeks for the OBR to prepare its forecast.
The spending pressures and the ‘black hole’ – how does the Treasury calculate it?
Rachel Reeves said in her statement that pressures on public spending exceeded allocated funding by £35 billion. Some of this is additional spending from accepting the recommended pay awards from the Pay Review Boards in England, which are higher than the previous government had budgeted for.
Others come from areas like accommodation for asylum claimants, which the previous government had just assumed would come from the Home Office’s spending limit. Given that the Home Office’s total allocation is £21 billion, you can see why accommodating a pressure worth nearly a third the size of its envelope was not credible.
The Treasury had set aside £9 billion in reserve – a usual management practice for unforeseen circumstances during the course of the year, and which allows the government to plan in some budget cover for unspecified departments. This reduces spending pressures to £26 billion.
The Treasury also assumes that some of these pressures will either not materialise (they are pressures after all, not crystallised spending yet) or that some will be “managed away” – usually by playing hardball and forcing departments to find savings somewhere else.
Ever wondered why the Home Office keeps putting fees for anything to do with visas and passports? The Treasury allows them to deduct it against their budget (fees are classified in Estimates as “negative spending”, for the fiscal aficionados) and it’s the quid pro quo of accepting responsibility for the financial risk for spending pressures.
There are a few rounds of this over the course of the year, and by the time of Supplementary Estimates – usually mid-February – the Treasury and other departments essentially have a stare-down contest, which tends to end up with both sides conceding somewhat, and so the Treasury assumes something about its ability to do that – what is called ‘fallaway’ in the document. This amounts to £7.1 billion, and bring estimated pressures down to £19 billion.
The Treasury then adds back £2.9 billion to get to what they call “total pressures”, because this is how much the OBR assumes that the UK Government will underspend its limits by. Essentially, the OBR assumed actual spending would be £2.9 billion lower than the limits; given that pressures on the Treasury side are relative to the limits, this amount needs added to get to the total pressures compared with the OBR forecast.
This ‘Treasury maths’ is all fine – but what does this mean in practice?
This statement only looked at the spending side of the ledger, comparing what had been budgeted for with what the most recent view of spending plans is. It’s actually quite consistent with the latest data from the ONS as well, which when compared with the OBR’s forecast and extrapolated for the rest of the year, would suggest that consumption spending (mostly comprising of departmental spending) is running around £20 billion higher than expected in March.
Faced with this, the Chancellor has several options: she can let borrowing increase – which would happen automatically if she accommodated pressures; she can reallocate spending from other areas to combat pressures; she could raise taxes; or a combination of the three.
The immediate signal appears to be that the Chancellor is not prepared to just borrow the additional £22 billion. She has committed to £5.5 billion in savings this year: £1.4 billion coming from means-testing winter fuel payments to pensioners, with most of the rest coming from as-yet not fully specified ‘efficiencies’: out of the £3.2 billion pencilled in, just £0.9 billion are itemised.
This is a legitimate criticism of the plans – these savings are hard to deliver and can’t just be magicked into existence. Although the same (or even more) could be said about the fantasy £20 billion in productivity improvements that Jeremy Hunt claimed he had delivered in his response.
But this still leaves around £16 billion to cover. Rachel Reeves left the door open to some tax rises – she said she would not increase any of the headline rates of income tax, National Insurance contributions, VAT or corporation tax, but that still leaves room for base-broadening reforms and increases in other taxes.
We’ll have to wait until the Autumn to see how much of this additional £16 billion will be covered by tax rises, and to what extent the Chancellor will accommodate some additional borrowing. A combination of the two seems likely.
Did Jeremy Hunt or the Treasury hide this?
The more politically heated debate was the extent to which there was some sort of hiding of the ugly truth of what spending pressures looked like in March, at the time which the OBR included the Treasury’s plans in the forecasts for the public finances.
Richard Hughes, Chair of the OBR, wrote a letter to the Treasury Committee announcing a review of the “adequacy of the information and the assurances provided to the OBR by the Treasury regarding departmental spending.”
This is a pretty strongly worded letter, and in my view – as someone who was included in the scrutiny of these spending plans – reflects long-standing frustrations of OBR officials and commissioners about their inability to fully assess the credibility of spending plans.
The Chancellor announced she would be updating the Charter for Budget Responsibility to include the sharing information on ‘immediate spending pressures’ with the OBR. This sounds like a good idea, right? So good that in fact it already is in place, and is provided in legislation by compelling the Government to make available to the OBR essentially any information that is relevant for the preparation of the forecasts.
And the Treasury does share this, in my experience – although with some prompting required at times. Ultimately, the biggest issue here is more political and less tractable than the Chancellor let on, and reflects what former commissioner Andy King wrote earlier in the year.
The OBR is really in a bit of a bind, having to reflect spending policy which is set at a very aggregate level and which it cannot opt out of including in the forecasts. If it did, it would be the nuclear option – it would cause a breakdown in the institutional framework between it and the Treasury.
This is quite a difficult institutional arrangement, and there’s probably no single solution that would solve that. But I do think that a bigger focus on economic categories such as pay, procurement and other elements – much like Andy King’s suggestion – would be helpful in increasing scrutiny and understanding of the underpinnings of the forecast.
I would go further in suggesting doing this for the largest departments as well as the overall central government sector – which would allow further scrutiny in terms of understanding what’s being planned for different areas in the face of an ageing population.
This is an area where the Treasury’s lack of interest and buy-in into providing always struck me as odd and self-defeating. Of course it might unearth some difficult trade-offs, but it is also what a responsible workforce planning authority should be doing anyway. And in any case, to govern is to choose – and all of us members of the public would benefit from having access to better information on this.
That alone would be enough to make it worthwhile keeping the pressure on the Treasury to agree to provide this.
Brace yourselves: a spending review is coming
The Chancellor also provided some much needed clarity in terms of the spending review timetable. We now know that what is essentially an interim 1-year review will be concluded alongside the Budget on 30 October, where 2025-26 budgets will be set.
The spring of 2025 will see a welcome return to multi-year budgeting, with a full spending review covering at least three of the five forecast years. There will also be a requirement for a spending review every two calendar years, bringing a much-needed default assumption about the frequency of these exercises. They had become progressively ad hoc, and it will be up to the Government to show it does indeed comply with its own set of timetables.
Implications for the Scottish Government
A few things stand out in terms of what this means for the Scottish Government. In terms of timings, we now know when the UK Budget will be and that it will come alongside a block grant settlement for 2025-26, a pre-condition for the Scottish Budget.
This means we are likely to see the Cabinet Secretary for Finance appearing in the Debating Chamber to deliver the Budget Statement in late November or early December – hopefully avoiding the difficulties the Finance Committee had in scrutinising the Budget last year due to proximity to recess.
In the case of most of the measures announced, the direct impact on the Scottish Budget might be relatively limited, though we’ll have to wait until 30 October to be sure. A non-negligible proportion of the accommodated pressures will come from reductions in other spending areas – most of those reallocations would not change budget totals, although composition matters for Barnett consequentials.
If there is increased borrowing to allow for some of this additional spending, then there might be some added funding for Scotland.
But where there is an immediate prospect of a decision for the Scottish Government to make is on winter fuel payments (or pension age winter heating payments, as they are now known in Scotland). This is now a devolved benefit, and the Scottish Government gets an additional block of funding on the basis of equivalent in England and Wales, worth around £180 million.
With eligibility being restricted, the transfer from Westminster will be reduced, and it will therefore be for the Scottish Government to decide whether it follows the UK Government in changing eligibility or whether it wants to maintain universality and therefore needs to find additional funds for it.
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