A heavy blow
The Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility published 396 pages on the UK economy this week.
By far the most instructive of these was page 146 of the OBR’s report. What this page shows is that, despite the billions chancellor George Osborne has pledged to find to invest in infrastructure spending over the next five years in an attempt to stimulate greater economic growth, more people will lose their jobs and more people will need help with housing.
The OBR expects additional housing benefit claimants to require £1.9 billion of support by April 2016. As an aside, the OBR also estimates that the much-trumpeted mortgage indemnity scheme to help 100,000 households in England to buy new homes will actually only result in an additional 30,000 housing transactions.
It is good that the penny finally seems to be dropping about the need for economic growth and how to foster it. For tens of thousands of people, though, this will be too little, too late.
