Government finances and spending

Paul Johnson, writing for the BBC, outlines the history of housing benefit and the gradual diversion of government funding away from house building and towards subsidising rents.

Housing benefit costs us more today than it did before the welfare cuts took effect in 2010, writes Paul Johnson in The Times. Failure to build enough houses and tax regimes that discourage owner occupiers from downsizing have together pushed up property values. Increasing numbers of young people in particular now resort to paying spiralling rents – with the housing benefit bill taking the toll.

This presentation was delivered at the Public Economics UK conference (PEUK 2015), held at Exeter University on 3-4 September 2015.

With the Bank of England setting interest rates and the Office for Budgetary Responsibility providing forecasts to help guide the public finances, Paul Johnson in The Times asks if there are other areas where independent bodies could improve economic governance by restraining the role of politicians.

Carl Emmerson sheds light on the practical implications of the public spending cuts announced in the July 2015 Budget in this piece, published in the Summer 2015 issue of Public Service Magazine.

This presentation was delivered at the Work Pensions and Labour Economics (WPEG) conference 2015 at the University of Sheffield, on 28 July 2015.

Last week’s Budget was the first of the new Parliament and the first by a Conservative government for nearly two decades. Following the pattern of all other general elections since 1987, the government announced a package of tax measures raising in excess of £5 billion a year. But there were also significant changes to public spending – with new cuts to social security spending but a reduction in the planned cuts to spending on public services. Overall the effect of the measures announced last week was to slow the pace of fiscal consolidation over the next three years but to increase the size of the eventual medium-term tightening.

This presentation was given at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), as part of an event entitled "Social protection and taxation", on 9 July 2015.

This presentation was given during a seminar entitled "Fiscal redistribution in developing countries", held at the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 10 July 2015.

This presentation was given at a conference organised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies' Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo), entitled "Improving productivity in developing countries: identifying bottlenecks and obstacles to productive investments and technology adoption", which took place on 8-9 July 2015.