Speakers’ statements on ministerial policy announcements made outside the House
Statements made by the Speaker deprecating the making of key policy announcements before they are made in the House of Commons.
The UK’s public sector will spend £1,226 billion in 2024/25. This briefing gives statistics and commentary on the various categories of recent public spending.
Public spending: a brief introduction (540 KB , PDF)
Public spending is planned under several intersecting sets of categories. The main ones are:
Each of these categories appears in departmental spending plans and accounts. The amounts going to each vary according to departmental responsibilities and central government priorities.
Money is spent on a very wide range of areas, but in most years social protection and health are the areas receiving the largest amounts (economic affairs and general public services have begun to replace education as the third-largest area of spending since the Covid-19 pandemic). In 2023/24, social protection accounted for £361 billion of total spending, health £221 billion, general public services £158 billion, education £112 billion, and economic affairs £92 billion. Spending related to old age is expected to make up an increasingly large proportion of overall spending as the UK’s population gets older.
Government departments each have their own budgets, which vary in size in line with the spending needs associated with their responsibilities. The departments with the largest budgets are usually the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education, which taken together account for over half of 2024/25’s planned spending.
Departments spend both centrally and by funding public bodies, which are used when spending needs a degree of operational or constitutional separation from government. The largest such bodies in terms of the amount of funding they receive are NHS England and the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
65% of all public spending in 2022/23 was in England, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland receiving 7%, 4% and 3% respectively. 19% could not be identified with any particular region, and 2% was spent outside the UK.
Some money has typically gone to the EU – the UK’s net contribution in 2023/24 was £6.3 billion, and the total is set to decrease over the next few years now that the UK has left the EU – and some is spent abroad as part of the international development budget.
In per-person terms, the UK’s public spending is similar to that of Australia. The UK is far from unusual in its spending among developed economies, either in the amount that it spends per person or relative to the size of its economy – its spending as a percentage of GDP is fairly typical amongst OECD members.
Public spending: a brief introduction (540 KB , PDF)
Statements made by the Speaker deprecating the making of key policy announcements before they are made in the House of Commons.
What 'statutory public inquiries' are, how they operate and summary details on the progress of active statutory inquiries
Latest data on government net borrowing and net debt.