UK budget deficit shows limited room for election giveaways

hl.co.uk:

We don’t support this browser anymore.
This means our website may not look and work as you would expect. Read more about browsers and how to update them here.

Newsroom

Newsroom articles are published by leading news agencies. Hargreaves Lansdown is not responsible for an article's content and its accuracy. We may not share the views of the author.

HL Podcast

HL Insight

Britain ran up a higher-than-expected budget deficit in November and borrowing in previous months was revised higher too, underscoring the limited room for pre-election tax cuts by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government.

Article originally published by Reuters. Hargreaves Lansdown is not responsible for its content or accuracy and may not share the author's views. News and research are not personal recommendations to deal. All investments can fall in value so you could get back less than you invest.

Published by

21 Dec 2023

Public sector net borrowing, excluding state-owned banks, totalled 14.3 billion pounds ($18.1 billion) in November, official data showed on Thursday. A Reuters poll of economists had pointed to 12.9 billion pounds.

Britain's statistics office revised up borrowing for each of the eight months by 3.7 billion pounds in total.

Borrowing in the first eight months of the financial year totalled 116.4 billion pounds, 24.4 billion pounds higher than in the April-November period a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said.

The figures served as a reminder of the fragility of the so-called fiscal headroom which Sunak hopes will allow for more tax cuts ahead of elections expected next year.

Headroom refers to the margin by which Britain's finance minister Jeremy Hunt can expand fiscal policy — through tax cuts or spending