§ The total expenditure to be provided in the Budget for 1943 is thus £5,756,000,000. Towards that total, it is estimated that overseas disinvestment will provide £600,000,000 or slightly less than in 1942 without the Canadian Government's contribution. That means that the figure of expenditure requiring domestic finance is £5,156,000,000. I am proposing to ask the Committee for new taxation which will raise the total of domestic revenue to £2,900,000,000. This will leave about £2,250,000,000 to be covered by domestic borrowing, some £60,000,000 more than in 1942–43. Towards such borrowing, £425,000,000, or about the same as in 1942, will be available from extra-budgetary funds, local authority surpluses, and the war risks and war damage payments in the hands of the public. On the trend of the figures for the last two years, we cannot count on an appreciable increase in undistributed profits, which I put at £350,000,000. In view of the prospect of some further expansion of the national income, I am justified, as last year, in expecting personal savings to show an increase, and I am assuming that, including provision for accrued taxation, they will reach about £1,300,000,000 as compared with £1,170,000,000 in the calendar 968 year 1942. On that basis, I estimate that the domestic borrowing of £2,250,000,000 would thus leave a residue, to be financed in the way I have just explained, of £175,000,000, or still of the same order as the basic figure for 1941, and the probable residue for the last financial year. If we succeed in establishing that position, we are, I think it will be agreed, continuing to keep the finances of the State on a firm and even keel.
§ I have proposed that we should raise about £2,900,000,000 by domestic revenue, and the Committee will now wish to hear what the revenue would be on the existing basis of taxation.