Speculation that Liz Truss is about to make to return to frontline politics has prompted a flurry of dodgy claims and daft statistics about the economic cost of last September’s mini-Budget. Here’s a quick debunking of the most common.
I’ll start with the biggest number: £74 billion (sometimes cited as £73 billion).
This appears to have been lifted from a headline in the Daily Express (26th October) which claimed that ‘Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget blunder cost UK an eye-watering £74 billion, finance chief reveals’.
Digging deeper, this was the Debt Management Office (DMO’s) estimate of the increase in the Net Financing Requirement for the fiscal year 2022-23 between April and September (actually £72.4 billion, but near enough).
This figure was included in the Growth Plan published on 23rd September, so was not news. In short, this was the extra money that the DMO expected to have to…
View original post 815 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments