§ Mr. FlynnTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what is the total per capita public expenditure in England in the past three years, excluding spending on social security.
§ Mr. Norman LamontAlthough information on public expenditure within the four countries of the United Kingdom is not available from the Treasury's public expenditure database or from the national accounts, a special exercise is carried out each year to collect this data. The results of the 1988 exercise were published in the House of CommonsOfficial Report on 25 October 1988, at columns 120–29.
In this annual exercise expenditure is divided into "identifiable" expenditure—that deemed to have been 7W incurred on behalf of the resident of each individual country—and "unidentifiable" expenditure—expenditure incurred on behalf of the United Kingdom as a whole, for example, defence spending. On the basis of the figures published on 25 October 1988 per capita identifiable public expenditure, excluding expenditure spending on social security, in England was as follows:
£ 1985–86 1,102 1986–87 1,166 1987–88 1,247 These figures relate to identifiable expenditure within the public expenditure planning total as defined for the 1988 and earlier public expenditure surveys. As announced in Cm. 441, the definition of the planning total has been changed for the 1989 public expenditure survey. As a consequence, the basis of this annual exercise will be changed to cover general Government expenditure. The results of this year's exercise will be published shortly.