Roger Lee

speaker

221 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Roger Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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It's just that we're coming at this from a position where I fear the credibility of the UK's fiscal position is very poor.

And that's not me saying that.

That is evidenced by the fact that borrowing costs are still the highest in the G7.

So I think we're coming at this from a position of weakness in terms of our international credibility.

If you just basically just look at the bond spreads at the moment.

So I think any sort of changes to the fiscal rules would probably be taken badly.

So, where are we as we stand at the moment?

And again, we come back to this thorny subject of the deficit, which is such a mystery to a lot of people, but it's just so important.

And of course, the deficit is the difference between what the government spends, which is about £1.4 trillion.

pounds a year and what it generates, which is about 1.3 trillion in an ideal world.

And then we take the difference of that and use that as a percentage over the size of the UK economy, which is about 3 trillion pounds.

So the numbers actually are quite simple.

The makeup of those numbers is incredibly complicated.

So where we are at the moment, in an ideal world, an economy runs with this deficit at about 3% of GDP.

So again, just quickly doing the maths, 3% of a 3 trillion economy is about 90 billion.

And that's usually where most economists would argue it'd be an optimal place for an economy to operate.

So the simple maths at the moment.

So the OBR forecast for this year is around 120 billion.

That has come down from last year for the reasons that we can talk about, but it's around £120 billion.

The problem is for the first two months of the fiscal year, our debt has exceeded the OBR forecast by £7.7 billion.

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