Government finances and spending

This presentation considers where the Chancellor might look if he wanted to increase tax receipts by about 1% of national income – enough to pay for the promised increase in NHS spending.

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

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.

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.

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.

David Phillips, associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, discusses the current health of local government finance, and the prospects of a 'fairer' funding formula helping improve the situation.

The fact that employees have workplace rights that the self-employed do not cannot be used to justify higher taxes on them, says Helen Miller.

It is hard to overstate just how big a change universal credit will be. It will create millions of winners and losers. Any poll tax moment, though, is most likely to occur for administrative reasons.

Whitehall and councils agree: new assessments of spending needs should be evidence-based and objective. But is that possible?

The 2008 financial crisis precipitated what has proved to be a big and permanent hit to the size and structure of the UK economy. It affects our incomes and the tough choices we face today.

The government is undertaking a ‘Fair Funding Review’ in conjunction with councils. The aim of this review is to propose a new system for allocating funding between councils, which will be based on updated and improved methods for estimating councils’ differing revenue-raising capacities and differing spending needs. The IFS and CIPFA hosted a roundtable on 12th September 2018 to discuss some of the big questions the review needs to address and tricky issues it needs to contend with. This presentation, which kicked off the roundtable, sets out the key findings from recent IFS research on the Fair Funding Review which speaks to these issues.