Public Sector Borrowing In February Takes UK Debt To GBP857 Billion

Thu, 18 Mar 2010

Government borrowing last month reached £12.4 billion, taking the total amount of money borrowed by the public sector in the current financial year to around £132 billion.

Despite the February figure being around £2 billion less than economists had predicted, it is still the highest ever for that month and nearly £4 billion more than last year’s figure of £8.8 billion.

According to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the country’s net debt now stands at £857.5 billion, or 60.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – up from the £712.4 billion (50.5 per cent of GDP) at the end of February 2009.

But today's figures are likely to provide some good news for chancellor Alistair Darling head of next week’s next week's Budget report, as they show the government is on course to borrow much less than the £178 billion forecasted for 2009/2010.

Howard Archer, chief European and UK economist at IHS Global Insight said: "The public sector finance data for February are better than feared and show reduced deterioration."

"Furthermore, January's shortfall was trimmed substantially while there were other downward revisions to earlier months in the fiscal year."

"This means that Mr Darling could significantly undershoot the £178 billion public sector borrowing requirement that he forecast for 2009/2010 in last December's Pre-Budget Report."
add to favouritesnewsletterlink to this pagesend to friendpost comments

Link to this page

Copy and Paste the following HTML into your page.