LONDON: UK Treasury chief George Osborne announced plans to sell billions of pounds of publicly-owned land, as official figures showed that Britain’s borrowing needs continue to fall.
Mr Osborne launched this year’s spending review, which aims to detail where £20 billion ($US31.2 billion) of cuts in departmental spending will come from. Government departments will be asked to specify by November 25 how they will contribute to the government’s target of selling at least 150,000 public-sector homes by 2020.
The government has already sold land with capacity for 100,000 homes in the last five years, the Treasury said, raising more than £1.7 billion and saving an additional £800 million in running costs, but taxpayers still own more than £300 billion worth of land and buildings – a figure that Mr Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, plans to keep curtailing.
The spending review comes as the UK government continues to reduce its budget deficit. The public sector in the UK borrowed £9.4 billion in June, the Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday. Figures exclude borrowing by state-owned banks.
Since the fiscal year started in April, borrowing figures have been positive for Mr Osborne, who has turned balancing the government’s books into a key policy objective. Compared with the same month last year, the government borrowed about £800 million less.
In fact, in his latest budget address, Mr Osborne said he would slow the pace of government cuts, spreading out austerity measures further into the five-year parliament. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog, now expects the Treasury to achieve a budget surplus in 2020, a year later than March estimates showed.
In order to meet this target, the government would have to borrow no more than £69.5 billion – about 3.7 per cent of total national output – by March next year. Besides saving on departmental expenditure, the Chancellor has announced £12 billion of cuts in welfare spending, as well as a pledge to raise an additional £5 billion from clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion.
