The Chancellor missed an opportunity to boost growth today with his Budget. Analysis by IPPR shows that an Alternative Budget could have increased the impact of GDP by a factor of five.
The Office of Budget Responsibility set out the fiscal multipliers of different forms of tax and spending changes in Table C8 of the 2010 Budget. Using these estimates it is possible to assess the impact of the Budget measures announced today that will take effect in 2013-14. Policy decisions for that year came to £1.71 billion.
The chart below shows that, taken as a whole, the measures announced by the Chancellor today to boost growth will increase GDP by just £0.51 billion. By contrast, alternative measures proposed by IPPR would increase GDP by £2.66 billion.
IPPR’s Alternative Budget would include a mixture of tax cuts and spending increases paid for through Osborne’s new tax avoidance and stamp duty proposals as well as an additional “mansion tax” of 1 per cent on properties worth more than £2 million. Our Alternative Budget would have the same fiscal effect as Osborne’s. IPPR’s preferred tax cut is an Obama-style cut in payroll taxes. Our original proposal, set out by Eric Beinhocker in last week’s Times (£), was for a 2p cut to employee National Insurance Contributions to be paid for over six years. But in order to ensure that all costs are paid this year, we set out here a 1p tax cut at a cost of £2.75 billion.
Our second priority is a jobs guarantee for young people out of work for more than one year. This would cost £400 million and help address the scarring effects that long-term unemployment can cause, particularly for young people. There are currently over 1,042,000 young people aged 16-24 out of work the second highest since comparable records began in 1992, and a rise of 67,600 in the last year. There are now 253,000 young people who have been unemployed for more than a year, an increase of 24,900 over the last year. Osborne’s Budget did nothing to address this.
Our final priority is increased infrastructure spending. The OBR’s analysis shows that the most effective way to boost growth is to increase infrastructure spending. But the Government is planning to cut its capital spending by 29 per cent between 2010/11 and 2014/15, largely following the path set out by Labour when it was in power. This was, perhaps, Labour’s biggest fiscal policy mistake. Not only does infrastructure spending boost growth, it has the advantage of adding to the UK’s productive capacity over the longer-term. The money raised from the various tax increases allows for a £2.9 billion boost to infrastructure spending.
As the chart above shows, these three measures combined would increase GDP by £2.66 billion, which is close to five times the stimulative impact of Osborne’s Budget. The Chancellor claimed today that his Budget was “growth-friendly”. But analysis from the OBR, which he established, shows that it is no such thing.
Will Straw is Associate Director at IPPR
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