Facts4eu and GB News have recently published charts showing the big increase in government spending in recent years. Here is my take on the numbers and their revealing findings.
In 1996-7, the last year of Conservative government before the Labour landslide win, the UK public sector spent £314.7 bn. (127 page 1997 budget book). By 2010 when Labour left office spending reached £671 bn (260 page 2009 budget book). Annual government borrowing rose from £33 bn to £175 bn.So spending was up 113% in cash terms and borrowing up 430%.
Inflation ran at 27%, so spending was up 86% more than prices.
In 2023-4 spending hit £1190 bn with borrowing at £159 bn, so the Coalition and Conservative governments put up spending by 77% and borrowing down by 9%. Inflation ran at 50% so spending was up 27% more than prices.
Rachel Reeves has put spending up by a further £88 bn this year, with borrowing planned at £118bn but in danger of over running.
So we see this century the public sector got a large real boost in spending power under Labour, helping the financial collapse in 2008-9 when government and private sector borrowing was excessive. It got a further boost under the last government averaging almost 2% a year after allowing for inflation. What austerity?
The truth is the explosion of spending, up 306% since 1997, has not been well spent. Lots has gone on inflated costs, low productivity, and on population growth of 20%. Borrowing has soared , helping drive the inflation higher.
Every year since 2010 we have heard of cuts, and some cuts have been made. Yet overall the surge of spending has been relentlessly upwards , with every public sector budget and body demanding more.
If my income had been as high as £31,000 in 1997 and was now £128,000, a cash increase of 306 %, I would have thought I had done well and could afford a better lifestyle. That is what has happened to the government’s spending multiplied by ten million, so why do they not feel better off?
November 10, 2025
Good morning.
With respect, there is one thing that everyone has forgotten to mention – PFI & PPP. Or, Private Finance Initiatives and Public-Private Partnerships.
Here we have a scheme where the government get the private sector to build something. In return the government lease back what was built for a fee and a term with the possibility of buying it should there be an option to do so.
For example. There is a stretch of motorway (I cannot remember where) that was constructed using the above. The agreement was that the government would pay a fee for every vehicle that used it. Detectors were laid in the road and when a vehicle passes over them the government pays a fee to the contractor. To this day this is still the case and the overall cost to the government has by far out stripped the initial cost of building it. This can be extracted elsewhere and is what is behind many of the costs we now have.
November 10, 2025
Mark. I think that may be the M6 toll which I avoid at all costs.
Government spending is off the scale and it’s hard to see what benefit it has for the country . Governments of all stripes have made welfare a lifestyle choice. I know, all member of my family is one.
We are reaching a tipping point where the bond market won’t continue funding us and real cutbacks will be necessary. The sooner the better.
November 10, 2025
Even worse, overall government spending is judged and justified against meeting a debt objective five years ahead based on “fiscal rules”. This is utterly meaningless and useless as government and the OBR, which makes the forecasts, are ten of millions out even on their short term forecasts. In order to get a better grip government needs to shorten its time horizon to one year. It needs a fiscal rule that requires a budget that reduces the annual spend to less than it’s annual income until the national debt is cut to less than 50% of GDP.
November 10, 2025
The scheme simply was a Hire Purchase tool to avoid hitting the nation costs immediately but became an increasing cost annually with no new benefits. It might have seemed a way to get political results fast but the debt built and built ….
November 10, 2025
It was off-balance sheet debt and spending.
November 10, 2025
Given the subject matter, I was looking to see if Lifelogic used his ‘drain’ metaphor.
It used to be a common feature for LL bingo along with PPE, etc but it has now virtually disappeared.
November 10, 2025
Our local large hospital was modernised and made bigger with PFI and it is very nicely done. However, anecdotally it is said that when a lightbulb needs changing people have to come from up country and it costs £220 to do it and a recent toilet blockage in the Gents took several weeks to clear in my own experience. I have argued for years that the government should have taken this burden off the NHS. I wonder how many doctors and nurses could be employed for this money – there a many newly qualified doctors who cannot get a job – what a waste all round and many are off to other countries after we have trained them and we import possibly sub standard ones from overseas. Of course importing ten million extra people in the last 20 years could not possibly have had any effect on government finances we are told, they are all net contributors.
November 10, 2025
this was a trick invented and implemented by Gordon Brown, to keep the public sector debt artificially lower than it would be otherwise. which seems hilarious considering how much public sector debt has gone up since then. the whole PFI thing is about getting things for revenue spending instead of capital spending, and making it look like the government has not borrowed more money. when in practise when it is something like a hospital the British state is pretty much committed to paying for it anyways.
November 11, 2025
PFI was originally founded in 1992 under Johnny Major – a bit before Brown, but the Blair government did increase it considerably.
November 10, 2025
Time for a lot of real austerity with a lot of matching tax cuts so as to incentivise people and businesses to produce more and allow people rather than the state to choose what they spend a lot more of their money on. As you have shown over 28 years and a variety of governments public spending has been consistently and inherently inefficient and very poor value for ever more money.
November 10, 2025
Real Austerity and tax cuts are on the way…. it will not be voluntary and will be matched with societal unrest. There is no alternative, we will have to learn the lesson again, in order to extricate ourselves from the economic collapse spiral. Pieces of our productive economy are breaking away and that which remains cannot provide the resources demanded by socialist policies. Prepare yourself.
November 11, 2025
Peter it will not happen to this Government as they will not grasp the nettle, afraid it will be the next one if the Uk is to survive.
A lot of people who have had the generosity and support of the taxpayers finances for years, will get to feel the shock of having to live within their means first.
Work (if you are capable) and self sufficientcy has to be the go to solution to get us back on track.
November 10, 2025
Morning Sir John,
Those figures are truly shocking.
The real question must be, are we getting better services for all this extra spending and therefore, are we getting real value for money? I think the answer is no on both counts.
I suppose that some of the increase is down to a growing population but not all of it.
We need to get away from the notion that the more money we throw at something, the better it will be. We need to ask two questions…
1) what do we want the state to do for us?
2) Are we getting value for money?
Personally I would say regarding the first question, as little as possible and in general terms, we really don’t get value for money from the Gangster State.
November 10, 2025
To 1. Law and Order, defence, border controls and not much else.
To 2. Not only are we not remotely getting value for money but so much of what they “provide” actually does vast net harm – Net zero, Covid Vaccines, Lockdowns, open door immigration policy, HS2, road blocking, DEI, two tier justice…
November 10, 2025
So Tim Davey has finally resigned calling the Trump libel a “mistake” not a “mistake” TIm all very deliberate and totally in line with BBC think! They are hugely Anti-Trump and similarly Anti-Farage.
They also have the wrong headed BBC bias on the EU, Climate alarmism, DEI, pregnant people, anti-Semitism, big government, the net harm Covid Vaccines, the lockdowns, the mad imposition of VAT of private school fees, there anti-landlord and anti-motorist agendas, their stance on the dire NHS, they anti-free speech and back door blasphemy laws agenda and their support for Kier’s appalling two tier justice, their pathetic coverage of the rape gangs…
Sir Kier’s blatant Two Tier Justice seems to be aimed at reducing “community tensions” – in reality it does the complete reverse! It will not even win Labour votes in the end as these groups will have their own religious parties to vote for. Just as devolution failed to advance Labour in Scotland or Wales!
November 10, 2025
Quite. If however the establishment hadn’t decided over our heads a long time ago that we would become just a land of varying ‘communities’, there wouldn’t be the tensions that there are.
November 10, 2025
‘Racial integration’ was claimed as the UK model. Don’t make me laugh.
If ever there was a national failure it is this.
November 10, 2025
We don’t want ‘integration’. Integration means the destruction of the native British.
The Jews have lived here 500 years and not integrated, they live separately but peacefully.
November 11, 2025
Most ‘races’ are good unless their religion promotes dominance
November 10, 2025
“varying ‘communities’” is now surely Starmer’s “Island of strangers”.
November 10, 2025
The BBC must be abolished. Its detailed misinformation was intended to get Trump killed. It nearly did. It indulges in the same lies about Putin. And they are effective lies, I see it on this blog.
November 10, 2025
@Lifelogic – is it bias or propaganda?
November 10, 2025
If GB News had deliberately “doctored” a speech by Obama so that it appeared he said the exact opposite of what he actually said, OFCOM would close it down tomorrow.
As a State Broadcaster, the BBC is beyond salvation. The BBC Poll Tax should be scrapped and it should be made to compete in the real world. If there is a market for its left-wing, “woke,” Trump-hating, anti-Semitic, Net Zero-obsessed, trans-promoting output, it will attract an audience and survive.
November 10, 2025
You could not do that to Obama because he never said anything.
November 11, 2025
Lynn
He did say we would go “to the back the queue” for a trade deal, words given to him by Cameron, because in the USA they say “to the back of the line”.
November 10, 2025
Deborah Turness (English and French degree) in her resignation statement says:-
“While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong”. She has stressed repeatedly that there is “no institutional bias” at the corporation.
So is she so deluded she actually things this or was she lying. They are climate alarmist nutters, anti-Semitic, left wing, pro two tier justice, pro vast immigration levels, anti Brexit, anti landlord, anti Thatcher, anti motorists, pro magic money tree “economics”, pro DEI, pro pregnant people…anti private schools and medicine!
November 10, 2025
“David Lammy makes me embarrassed to be British” | David Starkey Talks… to Benedict Spence
He embarrasses me too, another excellent video Mr Starkey do keep up your great service to the public.
November 10, 2025
The Long March Through the Institutions, pre set the expectation of the Public Sector. Their objective is to remove capitalism from the driving role of economic growth and replace it with social ideology.
The big problem they refuse to even debate is where with the wealth creators come from, if wealth creation is demonised and shut down at every opportunity.
When Ed Miliband comes out and claims Net Zero is providing thousands of green jobs, someone needs to remind him, creating work is not the same as creating wealth….
November 10, 2025
Oh it’s quite simple, you just keep chanting ‘tax the rich’ and hey presto.
The scale of who is rich will of course slide downward as each group considered rich clears off.
If what I’ve read is true, Starmer has already classed those on 45k and upwards as not being ‘working class’ or some such class war twaddle.
I’ve got family in academia and health care on that sort of salary who scream ‘tax the rich’, oh dear they may be in for a surprise shortly.
November 10, 2025
Doing work is constructive and produces useful things. Taxing work penalises good effort.
Spending consumes resources, so taxing excessive consumption would be more sensible than reducing the incentive to work and its value.
November 10, 2025
@Michelle – accept as Labour MP’s and supporters have pointed out recently she will have to soften her attacks, her tax asperations as the will hit the NHS, the Teachers and Train Drivers more that the workers that are funding them.
November 10, 2025
They are ‘the rich’ so they need to be taxed more, obviously.
November 11, 2025
It isn’t creating thousands of jobs. They’re re-branding existing jobs so they magically become “green jobs.”
November 10, 2025
Part of it is the usual reason that socialists love spending other people’s money on their clientele. I suspect also that the number of zeros in the figures is so large while the number of significant digits are still only the first four, a billion here or there hardly registers with these people. Socialists are a very entitled arrogant bunch.
November 10, 2025
Yes it always strikes me as odd that Labour constantly blame “14 years of Tory austerity” when they inherited the highest tax burden in the last 70 years. Those two things are incompatible, there hasn’t been any austerity at all. For example under the Conservatives NHS spending increased in real terms every single year except one under Osborne where it “only” went up only by the rate of inflation. Some austerity !
November 10, 2025
The Government don’t feel richer because they have so many demands on funds. For example they have spent between £5.5 and £6 billion on Afghan relocation schemes (flying the Afghan Tigers into the U.K.). The Ministry of Defence expects to spend an additional £1.5 billion by March 2029 bringing in more.
So allocating more money to Defence is pointless. Each time we intervene somewhere in the world, we have to surrender a good portion of the U.K. itself as a ‘homeland’ for the men ‘who helped us’, regardless of the danger to the British population.
November 10, 2025
@Lynn Atkinson – even the corrupt giveaway of Chagos is being classed as defence spendin
November 10, 2025
Agree with LA. Getting Involved in other people’s problems should be avoided. It rarely does any good and often results more difficulties and expense for ourselves.
November 10, 2025
We must stop poking our noses into these foreign countries’ conflicts, as the burden on the UK afterwards is now too big.
November 10, 2025
Off Topic.
Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia were the only countries voting against the new EU plan to set a binding EU-wide target of reducing geeenhouse gases by 90% by 2040 ( compared to 1990 levels).
The nonsense continues.
November 10, 2025
Austerity is tightening your belt and paying down your debt, not spending and borrowing even more.
There is austerity, but it’s aimed at ordinary people in the private sector. The government plan is to impose more of the same.
November 10, 2025
For several decades the public sector had a champion with the BBC and its cohorts – the socialists/Marxist media – pushing the false narrative of “austerity” while the public sector has consistently eaten up more and more of taxpayer’s money.
Somehow the propaganda made it seems as if the NHS was being starved of money when it was actually getting real terms increases most (if not all) of the time.
I am hoping that this extreme propaganda will at least be reduced from now on so we can have some sensible government policies that reflect reality rather than the rubbish on the BBC.
November 10, 2025
Being austere is stern or severe in manner or attitude, imposing living conditions with no comforts or luxuries. Just as are difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure.
This govt does not reduce expenditure. It spends heavily on bad, worthless and wasteful things, destroying the quality of life.
On GB News, Leo Kearse said he would willingly do Tim Davie’s vacant job for £20 less. Every little helps. Maybe Tesco should take over the BBC and offer better quality and value.
November 10, 2025
Sir John
It’s the Socialist way, lets hunt down more ways to tax with no consideration of the consequences. It is never about spend it only about tax, keep pumping taxpayer money to our friends and we will survive.
Net Zero according to the OBR will cost us all £803 billion or £30billion a year. If NetZero turns out to be a thing the equation missing is how will those billions be earn’t to pay for the changes? The UK Parliament has deindustrialised the UK by offshoring production – but we still need the output. So additional money to be sent abroad never to return, never to feed the tax take. The largest proportion of NetZero cost is having the money to send abroad to prop-up foreign regimes.
Spending with out earning is a never ending out of control spiral of decline, everyone outside of parliament knows that. Yet parliament persists in the reckless pursuit of decline, a reckless fight against the people and the nations.
‘it’s the economy stupid’ Tax isn’t earning, tax is the removal of the economy. More taxes to spend in a country with a future only comes from growing the economy and controlling the spending. Socialist don’t control spending; they are like kids in a sweet shop having access to everyone’s wallets but their own, so don’t give a ‘monkeys’. When it’s gone its gone
November 10, 2025
Let’s look at some of the projects funded by the UK Overseas Aid Budget (£14.1 billion) and devolved parliaments in recent years, and I defy anyone to think this is money well spent:
1. £84k from the Scottish Government for one erotic S&M dance performance.
2. £10k from the Welsh Government for Decolonising the Welsh Cake project, due to the colonial history of sugar, to apologise to tourists who might be offended that our ancestors used sugar produced by slaves.
3. £55 from the Welsh Government for solar-powered boats for a tribe in Peru, so they understood climate change and reduced their carbon footprint.
4. £4 million on gender affirming tree planting in Uganda.
5. £200k to pay for the ownership and study of TikTok dance (presumably what our NHS staff worked on during Covid)
6. £247k for the study of queer nature.
7. Grants for Trans robots
8. £114 million on inclusive green enterprises in Indian.
9. £9.5 million on accountability and inclusion in the Congo.
10. £500k for a fleet of electric Porsches for Albanian prisons.
11. £133k to study shrimp health in Bangladesh.
All this information and much more is available in Government documents. Like USAID, the UK has a serious problem with money laundering, all funded by the taxpayer.
November 10, 2025
Thanks for your clarity on how we are being fleeced by these charletons. Ever since 1997 this country has been led by Tony’s whimsical spin “Fings will only get better”, PFA s abuse, maxing out Govt Credit and Debt and Gordon Brown’s false boasting about a laundry list of millions expenditure as though it was something to be proud of and wasteful. This continued trend is hard to reverse.
November 10, 2025
Evidently our growing population isn’t contributing its fair share of tax.
Jonathan Portes what say you now?
He popped up again on the radio this morning talking about taxing the rich.
November 10, 2025
Spending is a choice, but while spending your own money is difficult …spending other peoples money is easy
November 10, 2025
To days good chuckle from the media (The DM). NetZero what netzero?
“Lammy has privately warned Starmer to rein in his overseas trips. He said the PM’s constant flights abroad were distracting him from the chaos at home. Starmer brushed it off. Last week he chalked up his fortieth foreign jolly since entering Downing Street, jetting into Brazil for the Cop30 summit. He’s already clocked up more air miles than any PM this century and has been labelled ‘Never Here Keir’. Incredibly, he’s due to jet off another half dozen times before Christmas.”
More runaway expenditure…
Now tell us something we don’t know
November 10, 2025
Sorry credit should be to The Express
November 10, 2025
Thanks John as you say the money has been made available but not well spent
November 10, 2025
Does the borrowing figures you quote above include all the PFI for hospitals, schools, there were lots more pfi plans that the Tories froze have Labour started to use them again?
Reply Costs of PFI contracts are part of annual spend. It is not counted as state borrowing.
November 10, 2025
Staggering figures, but not surprising. Surely an indictment of appalling government over the last 30 years, whichever party was in power. You cannot keep spending more money than you earn and borrowing to make up the difference, as a private individual. Governments can do so for a long time, but a day of reckoning is coming.
What is frightening is that none of our 650 current MPs seems to grasp the seriousness of the UK’s position.
The bond markets will push our interest rates higher and higher until they eventually say no more.
Then the people of the UK will discover what real austerity is.
November 10, 2025
off topic.
In a full dossier, published by the Telegraph, former independent adviser Michael Prescott highlights several – in his words – “troubling matters”.
Here’s a summary of the main claims written by Prescott in the memo:
“Anti-Trump” bias: Prescott says the BBC’s coverage of the 2024 US election was more critical of Donald Trump than of his opponent, Kamala Harris – including a misleading edit of a speech Trump delivered on 6 January 2021
“Ill-researched” stories on racism: He says the BBC had published “ill-researched material that suggested issues of racism when there were none”, including in a now-removed BBC Verify story about car insurance
Too few push alerts on migration and asylum seekers: There was a “selection bias” against sending stories about migration and asylum seekers to BBC News app users as push notifications, Prescott says
“One-sided” transgender coverage: He says the BBC had often published stories “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity” and had ignored certain voices
Anti-Israel bias in BBC Arabic: Several contributors to the BBC’s Arabic service selectively covered stories that were critical of Israel, Prescott writes
Broader issues in Gaza coverage: His other criticisms include misrepresenting the percentage of Palestinian women and children who have been killed by Israel’s military, and misrepresenting the likelihood of children starving under Israel’s aid blockade .
November 10, 2025
Can the BBC, one way or the other, be reduced to an organisation that just produces quality films, comedy, and arts / cultural / nature documentaries, and programmes that celebrate national events, and some sport such as Wimbledon, cricket, rugby and Olympic Games – and that’s it. And cut license fee by half.
November 10, 2025
No.
November 10, 2025
349 criminals were illicitly shipped, into the UK yesterday on the 9th November from France…
November 10, 2025
We need cross-party agreement and strategy about how to drastically reduce our whopping national debt and interest payments on that.
There should be a gov. department devoted purely to bring down debt for PR reasons as much as for practical ones.
November 10, 2025
There is cross party agreement to increase the debt by growing the deficit exponentially.
There is such a Department. It’s called ‘The Treasury’.
November 10, 2025
What austerity? We’ve obviously had so much money that we are able to spend vast sums sabotaging our energy system to make electricity expensive and less reliable for no reason what-so-ever. According to Professor Gordon Hughes of the Renewable Energy Foundation the UK taxpayer has already funded £220bn in renewable subsidies (£8000/household) since 2002 (2024 prices) and is currently funding £26bn/year. NESO has costed its Clean Power 2030 project at “over £40bn annually”, so another £8000/household by 2030 by which time it will be necessary to not only subsidise the renewables, the grid upgrades and the battery backups etc. but also the gas generated backup which will be needed to be available at any time to provide full power whilst only used for 5% of the time. All for what? Has anyone seen any real experimental evidence that CO2 causes global warming or are we simply expected to believe the modelling? Perhaps the £500bn+ spent on Net Zero by 2030, together with the advantages of having cheaper energy, may have been more usefully employed to cut our national debt rather than provide jobs for the Chinese?
November 11, 2025
Tyndall’s experiment 1861 with apparatus still visible at the Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle St., London, W1S 4BS.
A very interesting place to visit.
November 12, 2025
‘Are we simply expected to believe the modelling?’ An interesting question specially related to the work of Shula and Ott (S&O) who, as they themselves accurately state it in the introduction (‘Disclosures’) of their paper (available on Substack) ‘The authors did not perform any independent experiments to arrive at their conclusions, as all the necessary work has been done and is available in the scientific literature’. So they did not run any experiments themselves.
So what did they actually do?
S&O spend the whole part 2 of their paper ‘showing’ that the modelling work of van Wijngaarden and Happer (vW&H) is in practice full of inconsistent or wrong assumptions.
So vW&H present modelling results and S&O present … what? 26 pages of unsubstantial non-corroborated ‘assumptions’ (I want to remain polite).
But that has never prevented our own OriginalR telling us that S&O’s work corroborates vW&H’s work.