Fiscal Data

Public Expenditure and Revenue

• The Fiscal section of Millennium of Macroeconomic Data v3.1 (xls), contains long time series of spending and taxes up to the present day of which summary data are available via FRED
• Detailed medieval fiscal data for the UK and other countries can be found at the European State Finance Database
• A very useful website with data on UK public finances produced by Christopher Chantril is available at UK Public Spending
• The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) also maintains historical fiscal data on their page Fiscal Facts

The National Debt

The National Debt in the UK has a long history stretching back to the late C17th. It specifically represented the liabilities of the Exchequer or Consolidated Fund (and after 1968 the National Loans Fund) and so was a measure of central government debt. But it was not a consolidated measure as it did not net off the holdings of other central government bodies managed by the National Debt Commissioners and so did not represent the amount held in the market at any one time. From the late C19th it also became less representative of the public sector's overall debt as local authorities and public corporations began to issue debt, some of which was guaranteed by central government. For this reason measures of public sector debt became more important after the Second World War. Key sources of long time series on the national and public sector debt data are given below:

• The Fiscal section of Millennium of Macroeconomic Data v3.1 (xls), contains long annual time series of the national and public sector debt at par and market values up to the present day based on Clark (2001), parliamentary reports in the Sources, Methods and Uses section and the volumes by Pember and Boyle which can be found in the Relevant Periodicals section below.
• Monthly data on the market value of the national debt back to 1694 has very recently been put together by Martin Ellison and Andrew Scott can be found here
• Monthly data on the price and quantity of government securities since 1964 as well as various gilt indices can be found in the Heriot-Watt/IFoA/ESCoE British Government Securities Database which is located in a separate section below.

Official Data

Official ONS data on the Public Sector spending and revenue is available on the Public Sector Finances section of the ONS website. The public sector analytical tables (PSAT) contain data for central government, local government and public corporations back to 1946 and are consistent with the official National Accounts. Editions of Public Finance Trends, published by the ONS in the mid-1990s, are also available for the following years

• Public Finance Trends 95
• Public Finance Trends 96

The Debt Management Office (DMO) also provide detailed data on the composition of government debt on their website. More data can be found in the Relevant Periodicals section which contain a range of public spending and budget documents over the past 100 years.

Public Expenditure and Revenue

Much of what we know about fiscal spending and revenue from the late C17th comes from a Parliamentary report prepared by H.S. Chisholm, the Chief Clerk of the Exchequer, in 1869. This is available online in the HathiTrust digital archive alongside a useful historical report from the Commissioners of Inland Revenue.

• Chisholm Report, Part 1: Great Britain and Ireland separately 1688-1816
• Chisholm Report, Part 2: United Kingdom 1816-1869
• Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue covering 1856-1869, including a retrospective history

Chisholm's report however is known to contain inaccuracies and misses some elements of public sector finances.  Professor Patrick O'Brien's thesis British Government Revenue 1793-1815: a study in fiscal and financial policy in the wars against France from 1967 discusses some these issues and how they affect the estimates of public borrowing in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.  With thanks to Professor O'Brien this thesis has been digitised as part of this project and is available in the Oxford University Research Archive.

• British Government Revenue 1793-1815: a study in fiscal and financial policy in the wars against France

Analysis of Government Budgets

Sir Bernard Mallet's series on British Budgets in the late C19th and early C20th are available below

• Mallet on British Budgets 1887-1888 to 1912-1913
• Mallet on British Budgets 1913-4 to 1920-1
• Mallet on British Budgets 1921-22 to 1932-33

Also available in HathiTrust is Kirkaldy's study of Government war finance between 1914 and 1921.

• Kirkaldy's study of Government War Finance 1914-1921

James Cloyne has provided a narrative account of all legislated discretionary fiscal policy changes in the United Kingdom from 1945 to 2009 based on U.K. official Budget documents together with technical notes, press releases, Acts of Parliament, the Budget speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and related entries in the parliamentary record (Hansard).

• Discretionary Tax Shocks in the United Kingdom 1945-2009

A useful factsheet on the budget from 2010 put together by the House of Commons library is also available with a list of chancellors and budget dates since 1900:

• Factsheet on budgets and financial documents- 2010

The Evolution of the National Debt

Two Parliamentary reports in 1891 and 1898 provide a complete history of the National Debt from 1694 to 1890.

• History of the Earlier Years of the Funded Debt from 1694-1786
• The National Debt 1786-1890

Fenn's Compendium of English and Foreign Funds contains a wide variety of statistics and discussion related the National Debt and other financial information. Many editions have been digitised by Google. Those editions out of copyright and currently provided free are available from the Internet Archive and listed below.

• Fenn on the Funds 1st Edition 1837
• Fenn on the Funds 2nd Edition 1838
• Fenn on the Funds 3rd Edition 1840
• Fenn on the Funds 4th Edition 1854
• Fenn on the Funds 5th Edition 1855
• Fenn on the Funds 10th Edition 1869
• Fenn on the Funds 12th Edition 1876
• Fenn on the Funds 13th Edition 1883

Pember and Boyle's volumes covering the National Debt in the C20th are available in the Relevant Periodicals Section and cover the history of the national debt and government guaranteed securities between 1900 and 1975. Importantly they contain details on the published holdings of the National Debt Commissioners on a stock-by-stock basis allowing market holdings to be derived for each security.

The Radcliffe Report and an Economic Trends article of 1961 provide a discussion of debt management and an analysis of the debt by holder, providing a more detailed breakdown of holdings of the national debt by different sectors within the market as well as other official holdings by the Bank of England and the Exchange Equalisation Account between 1935 and 1957.

• Radcliffe Report Data on Distribution of National Debt
• ET - 98 - Exchequer financing and National Debt 1945-51 - Dec 1961

From 1960 the Bank of England published a regular analysis on the distribution and composition of the national debt and, from 1986, public sector net debt, in its Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin until 2002. From 1998 the Bank's debt management responsibilities were handed to the newly-formed Debt Management Office (DMO). The Bank's analyses are available for the financial years ending below and provide a complete history back to 1958 when the Radcliffe Report data ends:

Articles on the Distribution of the National Debt

1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

Articles on Total Public Sector Net Debt

1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

ONS guides to the development of public sector debt measures over time can be found below:

• Short history of government debt measures - ONS article
• Wider measures of public sector debt - ONS article 2017

The following titles are available to select in the dropdown menus of this section.

• The set of volumes by Pember and Boyle on British Government Securities in the Twentieth Century (with the kind permission of Deutsche Bank)
• Parliamentary Reports including Financial Statements and Budget Reports from 1969/70 (more to follow)
• Social Security statistics
• The Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income

Please select a publication title and year from the boxes below to narrow down the list. Alternatively type in a general search term. The available excel and pdf files are shown in the table. If the publication you are looking for is not in this section please see the complete list of downloadable publications. 

Select Publication or Input Search Term

Heriot-Watt / Institute and Faculty of Actuaries / ESCoE British Government Securities Database

For many years Heriot-Watt University and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries hosted a historical database on British Government Securities which was constructed and maintained by Andrew Cairns and David Wilkie. As of 2024, curation of the database is being passed to the Historical Data UK Repository at the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence. For more details please consult the ESCoE blog from February 2024. Queries about the database should now be addressed to ryland.thomas@bankofengland.co.uk

The dataset itself consists of spreadsheets that capture monthly quantities (from 1964) and prices (from 1975) of every gilt issued by the British Government up until the present. This allows an analysis of the gilt portfolio in terms of both nominal and market values and allows the construction of statistics on maturity and duration to be calculated according to the researcher’s needs. The third spreadsheet contains a historical record from 1975 of the FTSE Actuaries UK Gilts Indices to which David Wilkie and Andrew Cairns made important contributions.

The data are updated from time to time. We do not guarantee that the latest month-end data will be available immediately. This is intended as a research resource and a means of keeping a historical record, and not as a way of achieving current information which can be obtained from the Debt Management Office, Tradeweb and FTSE Russell. We are extremely grateful to FTSE Russell for their permission to continue to reproduce the historical record of the FTSE Actuaries Gilt indices.

The files with data for British Government Securities are listed below. Each is available in more than one format. The BGSFilesReadMe file gives a description of each of the files and the data therein. It should be studied before use is made of any of the data.

• BGSFilesReadMe (.doc)

The data files are available in Excel (.xlsx) format, or as comma separated variable (.csv) files. Zip files containing all the data files in each format are also available.

Latest data is up to end February 2024

Excel files

• BGSAmounts (.xlsx)
• BGSPrices (.xlsx)
• BGSIndices (.xlsx)
• BGSDetails (.xlsx)
• BGSExcel Zip file of all 4 files

CSV files

• BGSAmounts (.csv)
• BGSPrices (.csv)
• BGSIndices (.csv)
• BGSDetails (.csv)
• BGScsv Zip file of all 4 files

Clicking on any of the links below usually calls up the Excel or csv file, which can then be saved using "Save As". Your browser may give you the options of either opening or saving the file.

Note that the accuracy of any of the data is not warranted, though all of it is accurate to the best of our knowledge and belief. The reasons for possible inaccuracies are explained in the BGSFilesReadMe file. We cannot accept any responsibility for any use that may be made of the data. If you use the data for any publication, we would ask that the source of the data be acknowledged, in the form "data from the Heriot-Watt/ Institute and Faculty of Actuaries/ESCoE British Government Securities Database". Downloading any of the files means that you accept these conditions.