The 2015 Budget: In household terms
When George Osborne announced the Budget today, like his predecessors, he used some big numbers, generally millions and billions. There were lots of zeros being bandied about.
I find the Budget more relevant to people if instead of using such huge numbers, all financial amounts are quoted as pounds per household. It allows us to understand, on average, how much of our tax contribution is being spent on things.
So, without further ado, here’s the Budget in layman’s terms, all financials quoted as £/household.
The government will earn the following from the sale of organisations:
- £29.47 for Eurostar
- £2.02 for Greencoat UK Wind
- £1.36 for ConstructionLine
- £0.77 for the Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera)
- £5.44 for the Defense Support Group
- £350.31 for the sale of shares in Lloyds Banking Group
A further £467.09 is expected from the sale of the Income Contingency Repayment student loans book.
To prevent individual departments paying different amounts to either build their own data centres or outsource this service, the government will create a joint venture to host departments’ non–cloud based servers, which could save up to £3.89. (It is not clear whether this is a one-off saving or an annualised amount.)
A programme to benchmark public sector performance will deliver annual savings of £11.67.
The Skills Investment Fund will see additional funding of £0.15, as will the Video Games Prototype Fund, and the government will invest £23.35 on freeing up the 700 MHz spectrum for 4G use, and £0.77 on seismic surveys to boost offshore exploration in under-explored areas of the continental shelf.
More locally, it will spend:
- £3.77 to redevelop Brent Cross
- £3.03 on “Factory Manchester”
- £0.77 on Health North, building on the north’s strengths in health science
- £0.54 in the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre in Sheffield
- £0.43 on tech incubators in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield
- £0.04 on the Centre for Process Innovation, supporting innovation and knowledge transfer in the North East’s chemicals sector
- £2.33 on a proposal by six universities across the Midlands for a new Energy Research Accelerator
- £1.32 on the Croxley rail link
- £0.16 on the Wet Dock Crossing in Ipswich
The government will spend £2.59 in each of the next six years funding cutting-edge scientific research, and £3.89 on exploring driverless cars. It will provide £0.05 to help vulnerable individuals cut their energy bills.
An overall investment package of £48.66 has been committed for mental health. As part of this, £0.58 will be invested in each of the next five years to give care to women suffering from mental health issues during the perinatal or antenatal period, and £0.07 annually to significantly enhance current mental health and support services to the most vulnerable veterans in the community, and the same again to expand mental health services for Armed Forces veterans.
£0.09 will be provided to improve counter-terrorism at the border.
Is that better?
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