Do Reform's figures add up?

Let's start with that question. I mean, it is the question we're asking about all of these different manifestos or contracts, as this one's called, as do the sums add up? And in this case, the answer is, I mean, sort of on the surface, we do have some numbers from reform, but as you'll see in a second, there's a few question marks over them. OK, But to take that big question, do they add up? Yeah, I mean, like this is the total amount that they think that they would make by bringing money in. Basically it's mostly spending cuts. And there you've got the money that they want to spend on their various different measures. And the first thing to look at is the of the bars, this one here, £150 billion bringing money in is bigger than the the money going out. That's quite important. It suggests there's a kind of buffer, It suggests it's, it's sensible here it's fully costed more than fully costed. But here's the thing. Now we need to dig into what's actually comprised in those bars and if we do that, so kind of taking them apart, it gets a bit more complicated. So here's all the stuff they want to spend money on. That's the giveaways side of things. There's the money that they're kind of going to bring in. And for instance, there's some pretty striking things here. These are big figures we're talking about here, £70 billion, this particular one raising income tax, personal allowance to 20,000 lbs, cutting stamp duty to 0% below a £750,000, raising inheritance tax threshold, basically abolishing it for anything below £2,000,000. These are all big giveaways and for many people will be very attractive. But the issue is can you actually finance them? And that's where this side of things come in because you need to actually raise the money to pay for that stuff. And here there are definitely some interesting questions. I'm just going to look at a couple of them because I mean, you can kind of keep going down here and, and raising questions about all of them. But just to take a couple of them, the the biggest kind of line items here is we're going to raise £50 billion, they say, by slashing wasteful spending. OK. So let's just kind of look into that £50 billion big block of the money coming in. The idea here is you've got about 1000 billion. That's a trillion pounds of government current spending. So you've taken debt interest off, you've taken investment off, that's about a trillion pounds. And yeah, would spend saving 5 lbs in every 100 lbs of that would mean £50 billion. So that on the surface looks quite good. But here's the thing. OK, there's certain elements of this that might not be quite so easy to cut. So for instance, you've got the state pension and, and, and Reform haven't said anything about cutting the state pension, slashing the state pension. That's £140 billion of this. You've got welfare. Now Reform do have plans to cut welfare, but they put it in a different bit of their manifesto. So they've actually made the money from it in another bit. So one assumes it isn't part of the £50 billion because they've already claimed that money from elsewhere. So that takes the total down of of the amount that you could cut down to £680 billion. And we're being quite conservative here. We're just doing it by the line items that they're putting in here. Then you've got defence and international aid. Now they say they want to raise the defence budget. So and also international aid, again, they want to cut, but that is included in a different bit of the manifesto. So presumably it's not also being slashed here because the money is being made elsewhere as well. So get that rid of that as well. Now within this remaining bit, there's quite a lot of stuff that they don't want to cut, for instance, certain bits of health care. But let's assume that they are able to get 5 lbs in every 100 out of this remaining rump of government spending. Well, then you're talking about that going down to about £30 billion. So you see the issue here. So what was £50 billion is suddenly £30 billion on quite a conservative basis. And if we stick that back into the kind of the total sum total, that's, that's 30 billion. We, we could ask questions about whether you can really raise that much from the Bank of England. Now a lot of people have looked at this and they said actually kind of an interesting idea. They want to change the way that the bank pays it's reserves to different banks. It's it's a bit of a tax on the banking system, very unlikely to raise that much money without kind of causing a cataclysm within financial markets. So more realistic assessments of that in line with what people are doing elsewhere around the world, takes that down to about £10 billion. And here's the critical thing. Look, those two bars are a lot shorter than they were before. Put them back to this and suddenly what was £150 billion goes down to £105 billion and then you don't have that surplus. In fact, it's the opposite. You've got a £36 billion black hole. Now these are back of envelope sums, but they give you a sense of some of the holes that we're seeing just kind of at a glance in the first few hours of looking at their numbers. We'll bring you more as as we get it and more of the response from reform. But the final thing to note, OK, here, big picture, the scale of what we're talking about here, this is how much the Labour manifesto basically amounts to in terms of spending plans about, in terms of how much money they want to get out the door. That's the Conservatives £13 billion. That's the Lib Dems £27 billion. That is reform. It's multiples. It's many multiples times. It's more than 10 times what the Conservatives are planning to do. So you're talking about enormous amounts. In fact, the only manifesto that comes anywhere close and about beats it is the Green Party manifesto. So the big difference between the main parties and what they intend to do and these other parties on the sidelines. But certainly a very interesting document and as I say, we'll have more analysis on it in the coming hours.