UK public finances strengthen in August

Britain's finances improved in August, helped by lower government spending, and economists said a pickup in the economy could mean finance minister George Osborne beats his budget target this year.

The deficit fell to £13.16 billion in August, based on the widely used measure of public borrowing which strips out some of the effects of Britain’s bank bailouts.

That was down from £14.41 billion in August 2012, the Office for National Statistics said, and below forecasts in a Reuters poll for a deficit of £13.5 billion pounds.

Earlier this year, Mr Osborne came under heavy fire from the opposition Labour party and saw off calls from the International Monetary Fund to spend more to boost growth. He is now likely to find it easier to stick to his plan to rein in the still-huge budget deficit as the economy picks up speed.

When the Conservative-led coalition came to power in May 2010, the deficit stood at 11 per cent of annual economic output.

On an underlying basis - stripping out the effect of cash transfers from Royal Mail and the Bank of England - the government is aiming for a deficit of no more than £120 billion or 7.5 per cent of GDP this year, little changed from its share of GDP in the 2012/13 tax year.

For the first five months of the current tax year, the deficit on this measure totalled £46.8 billion, down more than 7 per cent compared with the same point in 2012, in part due to substantial downward revisions of previous borrowing estimates. There was also a lowering of the estimate for total borrowing in 2012/13.

“The government are likely to be quietly confident that they can undershoot the borrowing target come the end of 2013-14 given better prospects for the economy,” Sam Hill, a fixed income strategist at RBC in London, told clients in an email.

That would give Mr Osborne the chance to sound upbeat when he delivers a half-yearly budget statement towards the end of this year and would be a boost for prime minister David Cameron as he gears up for campaigning for the 2015 general election.

A long run of weak economic growth has limited tax revenues and made it harder for the government to cap social benefit costs. In a sign of the recovery starting to help public finances, revenues between April and August rose 2.8 per cent compared to a year earlier.

On the spending side, in August alone total spending by central government - excluding investment - fell by 2.2 per cent, led by a sharp drop in departmental spending. The figure was also helped by a change in the timing of distribution of funds to local authorities by central government.

Britain’s total net public debt, excluding the direct costs of bailing out the country’s banks, is still much higher than before the financial crisis at some £1.19 trillion or 74.6 per cent of GDP, a record percentage for the month of August.

(Reuters)