The Treasury will publish full accounts for all Whitehall departments to give taxpayers an idea of what the public finances would look like if it was a company.
The move will for the first time bring into one place the future liabilities of accrued pension liabilities for public sector workers and the future costs of schools and hospitals built using the private finance initiative.
Experts suggest that this will add an estimated £1,200billion from debt in the accounts of 1,500 public bodies to the Government’s books.
Adding in the official national debt figure of £909billion, it takes the overall total debt bill to more than £2,000 billion, as at the end of 2009/10.
It will allow taxpayers to be able to view the public finances as if Britain was a company listed on the London Stock Exchange.
The information has been published before by individual Whitehall departments, however it has not been reproduced in one place before. One Treasury source said: “The figures being brought together in one place are for how much we’ve committed to pay in the future on various things, like PFI.”
The new figures do not include future receipts from tax revenues.
Carl Emmerson, the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said declaring the figures meant that the Government was ensuring it would be in a situation where it uncovered “significant debts that had been brushed under the carpet” like in Greece.
Michael Izza, chief executive of the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, added: “We truly believe that when [the accounts] are published this will help Government to achieve its aims of providing improved data for fiscal planning.”
taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8632141/Britains-total-debt-to-top-2000000000000.html
No comments:
Post a Comment