Recommendation 4

The Office for Budget Responsibility has been stating that the public finances are on an unsustainable long-term trajectory since 2011, but the Government has not done enough to engage with the issue. The Government should routinely produce a more extensive and considered response to the Fiscal Sustainability Report than the 300-word statement it provided in 2020. Such a response should set out a strategy for how and at what level the public debt could and should be stabilised. To support this process, the Committee intends to carry out full scrutiny of the biennial Fiscal Sustainability Report in future, as it did for the first time in 2020.