Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they intend to take to reduce the current budget deficit.

The government remains committed to returning the public finances to balance, and has set out a new fiscal objective to achieve this at the earliest possible date in the next Parliament.

The government’s new fiscal mandate for this Parliament is to reduce the cyclically-adjusted deficit to less than 2% of GDP by 2020-21. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast that this rule will be met 2 years early with £26.6bn of headroom.

The OBR also forecast that the headline deficit will be reduced to 0.7% of GDP in 2021-22, the smallest deficit in two decades. The current balance, which is defined as the headline deficit excluding investment spending, returns to surplus in 2019-20.