Student loan shake-up puts £12bn hole in public finances National deficit increases after ONS says student loans count as government spending
Philip Hammond is facing a £12bn hole in the public finances this year after changes to the way student loans are treated on the government’s books, reflecting that many will never be repaid.
In a stroke of the pen from the Office for National Statistics, student loans will now be treated as part financial asset in the national accounts, because some will be repaid, while part will be classified as government expenditure, as some loans will never be paid back in full.
It said it would result in the budget deficit – the annual gap between government income and expenditure – increasing by about 0.6 percentage points of GDP a year, which equates to about £12bn in the current financial year.
The changes are bad news for the chancellor because they wipe out all of the windfall from a better performance in the public finances this year handed to him by the Office for Budget Responsibility.
It could also have significant implications for the review of university funding in England led by Philip Augar, which is due to report early in the new year and is considering whether to cut tuition fees from £9,250 per year.
i was talking with my family about this - by default Gordon Brown is the best PM of the last 20 years Tony Blair has Iraq hanging over him David Cameron austerity and the referendum decision May has austerity, Brexit means Brexit and Windrush
*<]:^D wrote:i was talking with my family about this - by default Gordon Brown is the best PM of the last 20 years Tony Blair has Iraq hanging over him David Cameron austerity and the referendum decision May has austerity, Brexit means Brexit and Windrush
equally depressing and ridiculous
Good old Gordon, he wasn't a great Prime Minister but he wins by default thanks to the others being such appalling human beings.
*<]:^D wrote:i was talking with my family about this - by default Gordon Brown is the best PM of the last 20 years Tony Blair has Iraq hanging over him David Cameron austerity and the referendum decision May has austerity, Brexit means Brexit and Windrush
equally depressing and ridiculous
Good old Gordon, he wasn't a great Prime Minister but he wins by default thanks to the others being such appalling human beings.
Wouldn't he be complict in all the Blair stuff. I'm guessing he wasn't PM then but he still supported it.
*<]:^D wrote:i was talking with my family about this - by default Gordon Brown is the best PM of the last 20 years Tony Blair has Iraq hanging over him David Cameron austerity and the referendum decision May has austerity, Brexit means Brexit and Windrush
equally depressing and ridiculous
Good old Gordon, he wasn't a great Prime Minister but he wins by default thanks to the others being such appalling human beings.
Wouldn't he be complict in all the Blair stuff. I'm guessing he wasn't PM then but he still supported it.
Probably but he wasn't the man in charge who made the actual decision.
Bit late now. It was clear long ago that they're absolute gooseberry fool: unsafe, the variable limits are a joke, the warning signs are a joke, and they're just an all around bad idea. Hopefully they see sense and scrap them altogether.
It took 2 1/2 years to convert a 15 mile stretch of the M3 to ALR, when you consider the amount of works and the timescale, they might as well have just included a hard shoulder.
The best parts are when the road is congested but they don't let you use the hard shoulder for.... Reasons? Defeating the whole point of the thing in the first place.
*<]:^D wrote:i was talking with my family about this - by default Gordon Brown is the best PM of the last 20 years Tony Blair has Iraq hanging over him David Cameron austerity and the referendum decision May has austerity, Brexit means Brexit and Windrush
equally depressing and ridiculous
Good old Gordon, he wasn't a great Prime Minister but he wins by default thanks to the others being such appalling human beings.
Wouldn't he be complict in all the Blair stuff. I'm guessing he wasn't PM then but he still supported it.
I mean it always felt he wanted Blair to die, so Im not sure how supportive Brown would have been.