MPs' Committee Doubts Government Plan To Manage "Phenomenal" National Debt

A new report by the influential Public Accounts Committee has questioned whether ministers have clear measures in place to assess the value for money of the “phenomenal” £2.6 trillion of Government borrowing.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a report on Tuesday warning that the government has not adequately learned lessons from the financial crisis and pandemic, with huge gaps remaining in how the Treasury and the Debt Management Office (DMO) track and measure government borrowing.

Reducing national debt was one of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges at the start of 2023. However, government borrowing has ballooned from around £300bn in 2003 to £2.6 trillion by the end of 2023. The new PAC report found that the Treasury has no directly measurable success criteria to meet its own objectives and assess whether it is securing value for money from its approach to managing this debt.

The report urged the Treasury to set out its plan to improve performance measurement against the debt management objective, including analytical comparisons to approaches taken elsewhere in the world.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the BBC over the weekend that he will not use further government borrowing to fund tax cuts in the Spring Budget, which he will deliver on Wednesday. But with government borrowing already at an all-time high, PAC chair and Labour MP Meg Hillier told PoliticsHome that the taxpayer was “on the hook” for any borrowing and it was more important than ever for the government to ensure it was managing it properly.  

“When the Budget happens it's pulling rabbits out of the hat, but what we look at a lot every year is the whole of government accounts, the real balance sheet of government: this is what funds the