"It is the duty of the Office to examine and report on the sustainability of the public finances"
Working paper No. 8: Anti-avoidance costings: an evaluation, looks back at the costings of recently announced anti-avoidance measures to assess their performance against the original costing. It finds that whilst a large number of measures perform close to expectations, there are on average more under-performing measures than over-performing ones.
Since the publication of our November 2015 Economic and fiscal outlook (EFO) we received a request to publish our estimate of the number of employees that will be paid the National Living Wage and the gender breakdown. We have published this new supplementary forecast information today, 22 January 2016, on the main EFO page on our website.
November’s public sector net borrowing of £14.2 billion was up on a year earlier, largely reflecting the timing of various spending items and that the boost to receipts from last year’s bank fines was not repeated. We continue to expect year-on-year falls in the deficit to be bigger over the final months of 2015-16. Read…
November 2015 All policy costings presented to the Office for Budget Responsibility at Spending Review and Autumn Statement 2015 were scrutinised and were certified as reasonable, central estimates were included in our forecasts. The Government’s Spending Review and Autumn Statement 2015 policy costings document briefly describes the methodologies underpinning these costings. In our November 2015 Economic and fiscal…
The Office for National Statistics has announced today that “private registered providers” of social housing in England will be reclassified from the private to the public sector in the National Accounts. This includes most housing associations and some for-profit housing bodies. As a result, the outstanding debt of these bodies will be included in the…
Our latest economic and fiscal forecast shows how the new Government has used its first Budget to loosen significantly the impending squeeze on public services spending that had been pencilled in by the Coalition in March. This is being financed by welfare cuts, net tax increases and three years of higher government borrowing. The Government has delayed…
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that Lord Burns has been re-appointed as a non-executive member of the OBR. Read the HM Treasury press release here
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that there will be a Summer Budget on Wednesday 8 July 2015. We will publish an updated forecast for the economy and public finances in our Economic and fiscal outlook alongside the statement. Reflecting this change to our usual timetable, we will publish abbreviated editions of our Fiscal sustainability and…
March 2015 All policy costings presented to the Office for Budget Responsibility at Budget 2015 were scrutinised and certified as reasonable, central estimates were included in our forecasts. The Government’s Budget 2015 document briefly describes the methodologies underpinning these costings. In our March 2015 Economic and fiscal outlook, for the first time we have published an assessment on the…
Despite stronger growth, we revised up our estimate of the budget deficit for this financial year in our latest forecast. But the budget is still forecast to be back in balance by 2018-19. The Government is on track to meet its fiscal mandate and the welfare cap, but not its supplementary debt target. The main Economic…