Author Description

Based on documents and some 130 in-depth interviews with civil servants and ministers, this book explores what happened to the UK's fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book combines analysis of developments in the fiscal constitution under each government with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to 'crowdsource' ideas for spending cuts. The book also includes chapters devoted to different aspects of spending control, namely, capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting for expenditure planning, and the development of new accounting metrics intended to promote better use of public spending and public assets. The book shows that: many of the underlying features of the UK's fiscal constitution persisted over the period, including arrangements for formula funding of the different countries within the union that had been originally intended as a short-term fix in the 1970s; much was made of formal rules and formulae for planning and controlling public spending, but the application of those rules was variable in practice; and classificatory dexterity was a key element in shaping public spending developments over the period. A comparative chapter puts the UK story into cross-national perspective, and the book concludes by exploring four possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of recent political upheavals and other possible political eruptions to come.