Government spending

The budget is less than two weeks away. Philip Hammond will have some good news to announce on the deficit. But mostly the challenges facing the UK public finances suggest that some very difficult choices will need to be made over the next few years.

Thomas Pope sets out the current state of the public finances, the outlook for the future, and some of the key economic and policy risks to the public finances in the medium and long term.

In this presentation, Ben Zaranko sets out the context for the choices facing the Chancellor, considers the necessary trade-offs and describes some of the possible implications for public service spending.

This presentation was given at the launch of the IFS Green Budget 2018 by Ross Campbell from ICAEW.

This was the introductory section at the launch of the IFS Green Budget 2018.

In a speech on Tuesday 9th October, the Secretary of State for International Development, Penny Mordaunt, touched upon a number of important issues taking centre stage in current debates on UK aid spending, including Brexit and the role of private sector investment. These two substantive issues are interesting within the context of broader developments in UK aid spending in recent years. A new report by researchers from the IFS and the Center for Global Development (CGD) analyses how UK aid is spent and the potential drivers of these changes.

Major changes are afoot in English local government finance. The Fair Funding Review will see new methods and formulae to redistribute funding between councils according to their assessed spending needs and revenue-raising capacity. The expansion of the business rates retention scheme is likely to see the abolition of revenue support grant. And changes to the adult social care system could have big impacts on the cost of the system and how it is financed. In this article for the Municipal Journal, David Phillips, discusses the big picture questions that need to considered along the policy detail in coming years.

Governments are responsible for spending huge amounts of public money. Effective control of that spending is essential if governments are to meet their fiscal objectives, deliver their desired policy outcomes, and achieve value for money for the taxpayer. A new IFS report, published today as part of a wider study of the history of public expenditure control, uses more than twenty years of data to analyse the planning and control of public expenditure between 1993 and 2015.

Presentation at the launch event for our report, held at the Institute for Government.

With substantial budget cuts and ongoing major reforms to the finance system (such as business rates retention and the Fair Funding Review), what scope is there for fair and sustainable funding for local government? This presentation, by David Phillips, IFS Associate Director, was given at the CIPFA annual conference in Bournemouth.