The UK has borrowed too much money, has a massive debt - £105 billion goes on paying our debt interest

[cakeorwine]

A good visual guide from the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2025/mar/24/visual-analysis-how-the-markets-boxed-in-rachel-reeves

But basically, the UK has had to rely on borrowing money as it spends more than it brings in.

It has borrowed money at low interest rates - but these rates have increased.

£105 billion on servicing debt interest. When you are borrowing a lot of money, even a small change in the interest level will massively increase the actual amount of money we need to pay on interest

Some context from the OBR on the budget

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainers/public-finances/

Income: £1149 billlion
Spending: £1276 billion
Of which £104 billion is on interest payments
Deficit: £127 billion

We need either more income, less spending and reduced interest payments.

I know exactly how they work, having worked for local authorities for over a decade. They’re not subsidised, the accounts are completely separate from the general account.

It's not to numbers of troops that I'm referring to, it's the cost.

It’s still not excessive, but don’t let that get in the way of your jokes…

That’s nonsense. Market rent is irrelevant. Council and social housing rents cover the cost of building, maintaining and administering the housing stock. There is no difference to be covered.

@Annajones101

Which country is a model of rich people paying the going rate for their consumption?

You keep telling yourself that.

Lazy arsed people need to get back to work and stop complaining that ‘they’ don’t give them enough. ‘They’ are the taxpayer and are all the other people who work day in, day out whilst the lazy ones sit on their arses watching Loose Women.

I am fully aware that there are some people who genuinely can’t work and I don’t mean them. However, if I can work when I have epilepsy and can sometimes have up to 10 seizures a week, why can’t others? I work full time from home and there’s loads of WFH jobs. I’m sick of funding other people’s lifestyle choices. I think that if you point blank refuse to take any job going then you should be made to do some sort of community service eg scrubbing graffiti off the walls or sweeping the streets. Guaranteed that once these people realised that they were working 37 hours a week for £70 in JSA they’d be taking any job going.

OK. You keep lying to yourself. Your local council’s housing accounts are public documents. You can check for yourself.

Do you offer struggle with reading comprehension or is it only when you don’t like what’s been explained to you?

You haven't explained anything; market rents have nothing to do with social housing rents. Market rents are for profit. Social housing rents are what housing in an area actually costs.

Yes it is a much better idea and why we need to invest in bricks and mortar for housing, care and eduction (especially early years). Otherwise tax payers money just filters off into private corporations and offshore bank accounts.

I could ask you the same question. And my posts are fact, not opinion. As so often here, facts are really inconvenient, aren’t they?

Where are all these jobs coming from? How does a disabled person get to work with no decent public transport and there is an enforced work from office only policy?

Every country has done this and debt is the main way money is created. "interest" is simply a requirement to protect against inflation.

We essentially make decision s that future tax revenues will be used to fund things that will be edit the country and increase those tax revenues. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Like there's nothing wrong with a mortgage, or getting a car on a PCP so you can commute and get a better job.

I’ll explain to both of you. Council owns a council house. It has a choice. It could put them on at market rent on the open market at e.g. £1,000 a month, or let to social housing tenants at an amount that covers the cost of providing that property of say £500. One if you is saying that there is no subsidy as £500 covers the cost, and one of you is saying that the council could get £1,000 do there is in effect a subsidy.

I think you can both be right depending on what you mean by subsidy.

The latter doesn’t meet the definition of a subsidy.

Except debt servicing is onerous and very high. It’s more than the defence budget rn

So?

Why is it being so high good? Wouldn’t you rather that amount of tax paid to cover it go to other things?

The problem is that it is not at all clear that the borrowing will result in increased future productivity.

It really depends on what the money is spent on.

There are essentially two extreme positions. One end where we borrow nothing, and infrastructure products that would enable us to increase productivity in the future remain unfunded and this therefore limits future growth. The other where we borrow huge amounts, significant amounts of money is funneled into unproductive areas and miss allocated, we do not grow the economy to keep up with the borrowing and we eventually trash the currency.

Determining exactly where we are now is the hard bit, but the markets generally give us an idea by telling us how much it is going to cost us to borrow. The higher the risk of currency collapse, the more they will charge to lend us money.

It's neither good nor bad in of itself.

It's funding items paid for historically which should be generating higher revenues. Things like roads and hospitals that have been built already. Would you rather they hadn't been built?

Sorry, been at work.

This is more or less what I wrote at 8:49 this morning.

Someone pays less because someone else pays more. if we’re splitting hair then it might not be called a subsidy, the spirit of the meaning is the same.

Someone pays less because someone else pays more.

That isn’t true in the case of social housing. Someone pays the actual cost, someone else pays the commercial rate.

And because that someone pays less the council needs to increase the Council Tax for those who pay it, of course, so they are, again, paying for someone else’s council services. I won’t call is subsidy, because it seems that’s difficult for some to understand.

But this is something you don’t want to see.

It can be bad in itself, hence warnings to France and Italy on high debt.

We should try to lower debt here rather than the opposite. Not only due to high debt servicing which eats into other budgets but IMF warned we were at risk if another high impact event occurred. We’d be without a buffer to deal with it.