Today’s public finance statistics are another case of good news/bad news for the government. First, the good news: the ONS revised down its estimate for government borrowing in the last fiscal year (2011/12) from £125 billion to £119.3 billion. That’s £6.7 billion below the OBR’s estimate in March this year, and means that the coalition succeeded in cutting the deficit by 25 per cent in its first two years (29 per cent in real terms).
But the bad news comes when you look at the current fiscal year. The ONS estimates government borrowing for August at £14.41 billion — roughly the same as August 2011 (£14.37 billion). These estimates do tend to end up being revised heavily — by an average of £1.8 billion, and usually downwards — so that figure might improve in the next releases.
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