Tag: #chartoftheweek

ICAEW chart of the week: A rush of capital spending in March

Our #ICAEWchartoftheweek this time is on the subject of public sector net investment. This is the government’s preferred measure of capital spending, including much needed investment in the UK’s economic and social infrastructure.

Over the years, the process for delivering capital expenditure in the public sector in the UK has had a pretty bad reputation. 

The anecdote goes that the first quarter is spent arguing about budgets, in the second everyone goes on holiday, and it is only in the third quarter that programmes finally get up and running, before everything stops for the Christmas break. The final quarter is then a mad rush to spend the remaining budget before the end of the financial year.

Unfortunately, there does appear to be some support for this conjecture when we take a look at the actual numbers.

According to the provisional financial results for the year released last week, around 41% of public sector net investment in 2018-19 was incurred in the last quarter. £8.2bn or 19% was reported in the last month alone!

Brexit has been an added complication in this particular financial year, with the government’s no-deal preparations in the run up to the end of March involving additional capital spending. Despite this, March was the peak month last year, as it has been over the years.

This is a stubbornly consistent feature of the public finances in the UK, even after numerous attempts within government to improve capital budgeting and delivery processes. For example, departments are now able to carry over some of their capital budgets to future years, which in theory should reduce the incentive to spend every last penny of their allocation in-year. In practice, a great deal of activity seems to take place in March, while April and May appear to be much quieter.

Of course, it is possible that our concerns about the quality of government’s investment delivery process are not fully justified. There could after all be some very good reasons as to why the winter months are the best time for carrying out public capital works!

ICAEW chart of the week: Housing sales

The ICAEW chart of the week this week is on the topic of the residential housing market, one of the swathe of economic statistics published by the Office for National Statistics last week. 

While there is often great interest in what is happening to house prices, data on the number of transactions tends to get less publicity – despite perhaps being more important to the economy. After all, people moving home often generate a great deal of additional economic activity, such as redecorating and buying new furniture.

There were 856,000 housing sales in the year ended 30 September 2018, down from 948,000 in 2016 and 36% lower than the pre-crisis peak of 1,340,000 in 2007.

Much of the decline in the volume of transactions has been put down to the weak economic recovery, with low real family incomes making it difficult for many to buy, despite extremely low mortgage rates. Another culprit may be stamp duty, a friction in the housing market as it significantly increases the cost of moving home.

The total value of the transactions in 2018 was £253bn, meaning that the average price paid for house in England & Wales was £296,000.

The statisticians prefer to focus on the median value, which was £232,000 in 2018. The ONS uses this to calculate affordability, with the ratio to gross annual earnings at 7.83 in 2018, up from the 7.77 seen in 2017. Surprisingly this is higher than the 7.17 calculated for the peak in 2007, which in turn was significantly higher than the ratio of 4.13 back in 2000.

With politicians of all parties keen to increase housing supply, the hope is that more people will be able to get on the housing ladder and the volume of transactions will start to increase again. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen.