David Cameron was caught out last week when he falsely claimed in a Conservative Party political broadcast that the coalition was “paying down Britain’s debts” (the national debt has risen from £811.3bn to £1.11trn since he entered office). But what of his even more frequent boast to have reduced the deficit by “a quarter”? The Conservatives’ website states:
Dealing with our debts means we have had to take tough decisions. But we are making progress: in the two years since we came to office, we’ve already cleared one quarter of the deficit left by Labour.
The Tories’ claim is based on the fact that public sector net borrowing fell from £159bn in 2009/10 to £121.6bn in 2011/12, a reduction of 24 per cent. But since the net borrowing figure includes investment spending, which even Nick Clegg now concedes was cut too fast (capital spending fell from £48.5bn in 09/10 to £28bn in 11/12, a 42.3 per cent reduction), a better test of the coalition’s fiscal rectitude is current borrowing, which reflects the difference between revenue and day-to-day (non-investment) spending. On this measure, borrowing has fallen from £110.5bn in 09/10 to £93.6bn in 11/12, a notably smaller reduction of 15.3 per cent. The shortfall in revenues caused by the near-absence of growth since the Spending Review in 2010 and the higher welfare bills caused by the rise in long-term unemployment have left Osborne unable to meet his deficit targets.
The coalition’s boast to have reduced borrowing by a quarter also depends on ignoring all the figures since April 2012, when the last financial year (11/12) ended. If we take into account the figures since then (see table PSF1 on p.36) , the picture is even worse. Over the last 12 months (January 2012-December 2012), the government’s net borrowing stands at £128.9bn (excluding the one-off transfer of Royal Mail pension assets to the public sector), an increase of 5.8 per cent since 2011, when borrowing was £121.4bn, and a fall of only 18.3 per cent since 09/10. As for current borrowing, that stands at £103.4bn over the last year, a reduction of just 6.4 per cent since 09/10 (when current borrowing was £110.5bn).
So, to summarise, the coalition reduced net borrowing by 24 per cent between 09/10 and 11/12 but only by slashing infrastructure spending by 42 per cent and tipping the UK into a double-dip recession and, perhaps, a triple-dip. Current borrowing has fallen by a smaller 15.3 per cent over that period.
If, unlike Cameron, we take into account the borrowing figures since April 2012 , net borrowing has fallen by 18.3 per cent since 09/10, while current borrowing has fallen by just 6.4 per cent.
For a government whose raison d’etre is deficit reduction (“The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement,” states the Coalition Agreement), the coalition really isn’t very good at it.
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