approximately 1.14 trillion British pounds in the 2023/24 financial year, compared with 1.16 trillion in 2022/23.
raised by the government in 2023/24 was calculated to have been 1.03 trillion pounds, leaving a deficit of over 107 billion pounds which the government
to finance its expenditure. With the UK consistently borrowing money to finance its spending, the government has accrued a significant
When is debt expected to come down?
As a
proportion of GDP, the UK's national debt is predicted to continue to rise in the next few years, and reach a peak of 93.2 percent of GDP in 2026/27, and 2027/28 before starting to fall in 2028/29. Reducing the debt will be a difficult task however, with future government spending or tax cuts limited to the
fiscal headroom amount of just 8.9 billion pounds as of March 2024. Government debt has increased substantially following the
global financial crisis, and also due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, the global
Inflation Crisis, from late 2021 onwards, lead to the
UK inflation rate reaching a 41-year-high of 11.1 percent in October 2022. Food and energy prices in particular grew at an accelerated pace, plunging UK households into a difficult
Cost of Living Crisis. In response, the government announced
several policies in 2022 to subsidize the energy bills of households, and reduce their tax burden.
COVID-19 pandemic led to huge public spending
In order to protect the incomes of workers unable to work during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government spent a significant amount of money paying the wages of furloughed employees on its Job Retention Scheme. Over the course of the furlough scheme, which lasted from April 2020 to November 2021, the
government spent approximately 70 billion pounds paying the wages of 11.7 million
workers. Extra spending was also required to support the National Health Service (NHS), with
health spending jumping from 173 billion pounds in 2019/20 to 218.1 billion pounds in 2020/21. Due to the severe
economic downturn that occurred as a result of the pandemic, the amount of money which the government could raise, such as in taxes, also decreased during time. Overall, UK
government spending reached a peacetime-high of 53 percent of GDP in 2020/21, leading to a
budget deficit that was equivalent of 15.1 percent of GDP in the same financial year.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no
liability for the information given being complete or correct.
Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date
data than referenced in the text.
