Tag: Office for National Statistics

Nearly three years after the EU referendum, I no longer feel the same connection. Then Brexit happened. People who were aware of my plan to move to Greece, people whose children are dating foreign nationals, how could they vote for Brexit? I don’t want to say I’ll never come back to the UK because I will always be British. I started to think about going back to Europe the next day. I stopped speaking to people who voted leave. Everyone keeps saying we don’t know what people voted for. We’re lucky – some of our friends here have only British passports and are worried that they will be told to go home. They are sad about Brexit, but have moved on. We’re sorry we asked you to do the same thing every other country was doing!” Maybe now the politicians will realise the world is bigger than Great Britain.

So how loans are recorded and accounted for matter and both the OBR and ONS agree. So what are these “fiscal illusions” and why do they matter? As Chote observes, this has “practical difficulties” such as making tricky 30-year forecasts and adding up to £15 billion a year in “spending” today. None of this might matter quite so much if current higher education policy were widely supported. Poor value for money, questionable outcomes, high debt and v-c pay all continue to dominate headlines alongside questions about declining part-time numbers and neglected technical education. But these changes will mean that maintaining the current system could be just as expensive if the government has to account for more spending upfront. First is that even if the government decided to keep spending the money – and abandon the political optics of sound fiscal policy – there is no guarantee that they would want to spend it in exactly the same way. But this would also mean less tuition fee income for universities and only a small possibility of increased grant in a 2019 Spending Review already dominated by the NHS. So too might be increasing student loan income if via reduced thresholds and longer repayment terms. Reducing fees and debt – as well as increasing loan repayments and better complying with any revised accounting standards – might be seen as a big win in the circumstances.