The debt adds up

Hereford

Why shouldn't pension liabilities be included? Are they optional? Could the Government decide that they will not honour pension committments?

Westminster Watch

So if the above is right (including bank bailout), that's approximately £39,000 for every man, woman and child in the UK!

mart

"And that's a constraint few ministers will welcome"

You betcha. Doggone.

But we need transparency from our public servants. Why should we expect less?

I hope Mr Newmark gets a hearing from our broadcast media as well as the Spectator.

Dr Tchok

Yes, but no...

The Tories must find a way of delivering this message clearly. Brooks Newmark was doing a creditable job in publicising this point, but in order to make it resonate in the country, it is crucial to explain it in ways that do not use the words "on-balance sheet" and "off-balance sheet" (including the Today presenters, I suspect - other than Evan Davies - in which case you have no hope of getting the message across.)

Further, I suspect that most people don't really understand what an increase in national debt means to them personally, apart from some rather nebulous feeling that it is a Bad Thing.

If the Tories can't explain to the electorate in clear terms how Brown is lying, nor why this affects the electorate, the voters will believe the Labour line that the Tories have no alternative plan to deal with the economy.

TGF UKIP

What should and would really frighten the crap out of voters is the five year projection.

Fraser produced some months back the 2008 Budget time Maastricht Treaty debt definition (ie unwanglable by the Treasury) This showed 08/09 debt at 679bn rising to 844 by 12/13.

Throw in all the other spending factored in since then plus the costs of major recession by way of tax fall and welfare increase and you'll almost certainly be at a trillion by 2013 even before PFI etc.

mark c

Go Brooks, bet the speaker will never hand him the baton tho

Kev G

Or about 3.75x annual tax take. More, given that the tax take heading south.

What about tax credits? Aren't they off BS? Or do they merely serve to ramp up the multiplier?

RobertD

Ther is one other massive unrecorded government liability which is the future healthcare costs of the retired. The NHS works on a pay as you go basis. While in employment peole pay contributions of which about 25% go pay for healthcare for children, 25% goes to paying for the healthcare costs of working aged people, and 50% goes to paying the costs of the retired.

When the NHS was set up peole did not live long in retirement, and the range of treatments available was relatively limited and took only a small proportion of total NHS spending. Now it is the fastest growing area of health expenditure and could easily reach 60-70% of total healthcare costs in the near future.

The contribution to the NHS per employed person (through NI and tax) is about £4,000 pa, or which half should be put aside each year for 40 years to cover that persons costs after retirement. At retirement the pot saved for future heathcare costs should be about £80,000 each, or a total over 19 million retired people of somewhere in the region of £1.5 trillion.

Its a commitment of future government money as real as selling government bonds to the City (unless Gordon has a cull at 65 policy to announce). There is no recognition of this liability anywhere in the government accounts.

Nicholas

Still not good enough if it's not being reported on the BBC and in other mainstream media. It may as well be fiction. Brown's lies are outrageous but are being subscribed to by the BBC and most mainstream media with no journalist anywhere prepared to challenge them and report the truth. This is the elephant in the room that everyone is studiously avoiding.

Brown is Nixon without any Watergate investigative journalism. It appears the media have sold out, lock, stock and barrel to political interests. Shame on you, hacks.

The Tories need to do something to ensure this truth hits the headlines and remains there.

Nicholas

Still not good enough if it's not being reported on the BBC and in other mainstream media. It may as well be fiction. Brown's lies are outrageous but are being subscribed to by the BBC and most mainstream media with no journalist anywhere prepared to challenge them and report the truth. This is the elephant in the room that everyone is studiously avoiding.

Brown is Nixon without any Watergate investigative journalism. It appears the media have sold out, lock, stock and barrel to political interests. Shame on you, hacks.

The Tories need to do something to ensure this truth hits the headlines and remains there.

CS

At least you have the grace to admit that there's an argument that pension liabilities shouldn't be included on any offical measure of debt. Especially considering that this report is quite selective in which pension liabilities it chooses to include.

Where in these figures is the vast future debt from the state pensions that have to be paid out?

Or perhaps blaming state pensioners (media picture of little old ladies with one bar on the fire) doesn't come under the same heading of lazy dog whistle crap as blaming public employees.

I assume that, if ever Hoskin or Newmark are in an accident, when the NHS ambulance turns up, they'll stick to their principles and wave away the paramedics, saying: "You're public employees so you can't be paramedics. You must be diversity outreach workers".

Hysteria

I must be missing something - B&B is on the list - what about Northern Rock?

Random

Aaaaaaargggggh!

£127 billion is not "over 3 times greater than" £40 billion.

Three times greater than 40 is 160! If you mean "over three times as great as" then say that. This is my pet hate, and so many professional journalists, who should know what words mean, use a term that is at best ambiguous and inelligant, at worst simply wrong!

I agree with you about the point of the post though. UK debt is apalling, and Brown is lying about it.

crsmumby

Last night on Newsnight - Geoffrey Robinson stated that PFI added only 1% to total debt. He said he had looked it up before the interview.

Anyone got an idea of how he arrived at this figure - it sure doesn't tally with the £100bn listed above.

Could it be he was amortising the debt over the term and the 1% was the amount due this financial year?

cuffleyburgers

Some one needs to remnd the BBC that the Tories will almost certainly win the next election and that the TV licence fee is geting more and more unpopular.

There are all sorts of alternative models that would deliver equally good or better media services than the increasingly dire Beeb, and it willl do no harm to remind them.

of course getting Murdoch on board is the real holy grail, it's to Cameron's demerit that he hasn't managed that yet.

Max Horn

If you were the MD of a plc, and you produced and signed off on a balance with this much 'creative accounting' you would be behind bars.

mitch

What do we have to show for it? a shiny new recession and 7million on benefits.

Pete Hoskin

Hysteria: Northern Rock is rolled into the Net Debt figure at the top of the list. It's the 43.3 percent of GDP measurement that the ONS came up with recently. But, as Fraser outlined yesterday, Brown's deciced to override that figure and create his own version of Net Debt which doesn't include Northern Rock.