Whole of Government Accounts: The first findings ~ Technology Update

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Whole of Government Accounts: The first findings

2:10 PM latest techno report No comments

The latest figures on PFI, national deficit and public sector pension liabilities

The first draft of the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) was published today.

It gives a unique insight into how the Labour government balanced the books during their last year in power - the financial year 2009/10.

The publication today needs some appreciation of how accounts are constructed.

The basic idea behind accounts is that an organisation requiring money to run can be considered in terms of three things:

The amount the organisation owns and is owed to it. The WGA gives a figure of £1.2 trillion for the UK assets.
What the organisation owes to others. The WGA gives a figure of £2.4 trillion for the UK liabilities.
If you take what is owned and owed from others and use that to pay off all the debts, then the resulting figure is the return to the investors or taxpayers in this case. That would leave the UK owing £1.2 trillion for 2009/10 according to the WGA.

One important note is that the figures for assets and liabilities above do not include the public sector banks.

HM Treasury have provided a very basic breakdown of the UK assets and liabilities and the total owed if all assets were used to pay off all liabilities, in this diagram:

One of the striking figures is that £1,133bn is spent on public sector pensions, making up the largest portion of all liabilities.

Other key findings are:

PFI There are 609 PFI contracts included in WGA. If we compare this with 800 agreements listed in this select committee document (PDF) and as explored in the Datablog guide to PFI, we can see that about 200 PFI deals are not included in the WGA publication today.
Money in and money out In 2009/10 the UK received £585.5bn mostly from tax money, it spent £688.7bn, including £195.6bn on social benefit payments, and £180.4bn employing staff.
National deficit In 2009/10 the government had a total deficit of £164.1bn (11.7 % of GPD).

These are the figures highlighted in the first WGA report, what would you like us to look into?