Not All Government Departments are Created Equal?
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They say “all men are created equal”.
In truth, very little in this world is equal. And as you can probably tell from the title of this article, neither are the UK government’s departmental budgets – and rightfully so. Clearly, the department for environment, food, and rural affairs is not tantamount to the NHS – if it was then we’d be spending £117 billion a year to raise chickens, and only £2.3 billion to save lives. Our public spending needs to be proportional to the societal need for certain services and provisions. Whilst it may be true when you compare some departments, other departments have to make do with loose change. Let’s take the transport budget for example, which stood at £7.8 billion last year, having been cut from £11 billion in 2014-15. Between now and 2026, the government plans to spend £56 billion on HS2. Despite promising to increase capacity on the railways significantly, that’s still more than seven times the annual budget for managing 1.7 billion railway passenger journeys, 5.2 billion bus journeys and the 6,500 miles that Brits travel on average every single year being spent on one railway line. With every new budget, there will always be winners and losers – with the NHS and education tending to fare well as protected areas of spending, whilst budgets like justice, culture, and business, innovation, and skills reliably face cuts.
As you may expect, the department with the largest budget (accounting for inflation) is the NHS, which was afforded a staggering £117 billion in 2015/16, and which is set to increase to around £129 billion by 2019/20. Next up is education with a budget of £57 billion, again set to rise to above £60 billion by 2019/20. Rounding out to top three is defence, which was given £35 billion last year and – in line with Nato targets – is set to increase year on year.
Some of the lowest budgets can be found for culture, media and sport (£1.4 billion), the law officer’s departments (£500 million), the foreign and commonwealth office (£1.8 billion) and – weirdly – HM treasury’s expenditure limit was £531 million last year as they were expected to contribute half a million to go back into the overall spending pot. That overall sum of spending for all government departments was £355 million for 2015/16 – the lowest for five years. However, over the next five years, spending is supposed to increase by around £17 billion.