§ Mr. Chris Smithasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will indicate, for each of the last three financial years and in estimate form for the current financial year, the reduction in the public sector borrowing requirement which has accrued from the removal of the capital borrowing requirements of privatised industries into the private sector; and if he will break this down on an enterprise by enterprise basis.
§ Mr. MajorThe nationalised industries' contribution to the public sector borrowing requirement is defined as the sum of their external financing requirements. The Government cannot provide estimates, which would be purely hypothetical, of what the financing requirements of privatised companies might have been had they been still in the public sector. Details of the industries' external finance up to the point of privatisation are published in the public expenditure White Paper for the following year; provisional outturns are first published in the cash limits provisional outturn White Paper.