A hole in the public finances

Government borrowing has risen as sluggish wage growth weighs on tax receipts.

The government's plan to reduce its annual overspend (the deficit) this tax year isn't going to plan. The Treasury borrowed £11.6bn in August, £0.7bn higher than last year.

Borrowing in the first five months of the 2014/15 fiscal year came in at £45.4bn, 6% higher than last year. Yet the plan was for borrowing to fall by 12% this year, according to projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.