In his first speech as Reform’s Shadow Chancellor, Robert Jenrick, promised to manage the public finances based on “strict, world-class fiscal rules”. He didn’t specify what those rules would be, and he plans to consult before deciding. To get him started here are some thoughts from a taxpayer perspective.
We’ve had fiscal rules since 1997, and as we’ve discussed before, they’ve been a dismal failure for taxpayers. Since their inception the public sector debt ratio (debt as a percentage of GDP) has ballooned from 36 to 95 percent – equivalent in today’s terms to over £60,000 of additional debt for every single UK household.
On top of that, the tax burden has increased from 30 to 36 per cent of GDP, heading up…