Jeremy Hunt is yet to get a grip on government borrowing

All eyes are on tomorrow’s inflation rate figures, which need to start falling fast for Rishi Sunak to make good on his pledge to ‘halve inflation’ by the end of the year. But this morning we got an update on the one pledge from No.10 that was never likely to be made good on: the promise to get national debt falling.

This morning’s figures show us the extent to which those numbers are going in the wrong direction. Public sector borrowing in the month of April rose to £25.6 billion, almost £12 billion more than April last year. This makes last month the second-highest borrowing April on record.

Rather than the pandemic years becoming a one-off spending spree, we increasingly see in the data how they ushered in a new era of substantial borrowing for a variety of measures. In his statement on the figures this morning, chancellor Jeremy Hunt notes the government was ‘right’ to borrow ‘billions to protect families and businesses against the impacts of the pandemic and Putin’s energy crisis’.