Government spending

Presentation given at the 'Autumn Statement 2014: IFS analysis' event on 4 December 2014.

Presentation given at the 'Autumn Statement 2014: IFS analysis' event on 4 December 2014.

Presentation to the CIPFA Pensions Network CFO Briefing, 24 November 2014, London.

With the general election now just eight months away the political parties are starting to set out what they would aim to achieve in government. In this observation, we describe what each of the three main UK parties have said about their fiscal targets and discuss how these differ from current coalition government policy and from each other. Meeting the Conservatives’ target could result in debt falling more quickly than would be the case under the rules proposed by Labour or the Liberal Democrats. But doing so would require tax rises or significantly greater cuts in public spending than Labour and the Liberal Democrats would require to meet their rules – on top of those that are already planned up to 2015–16.

The future of the welfare state, and particularly of the NHS, has taken centre stage in the Scottish independence debate in recent days. Given the political rhetoric, there is a clear need for some impartial analysis. In this observation we try to set out some of the facts on both recent changes in NHS spending in England and Scotland, and the prospects for the future whether Scotland is in or out of the Union. Our analysis suggests it is unlikely that independence would make it easier to find additional money for the NHS.

This presentation was given at a workshop entitled 'European Public Finances Through the Financial Crisis' at the ZEW Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany.

This paper was presented at the Fiscal Rules Roundtable at the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 21 May 2014. This event formed part of a programme of work funded by the ESRC entitled "Combining micro- and macro- economic approaches to fiscal policy evaluation"