Spring Statement
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Spring Statement of the British Government is one of the two statements HM Treasury makes each year to Parliament upon publication of economic forecasts, the second being the budget presented in the autumn. Both usually involve speeches in the House of Commons by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Depending on its timing, the statement may also be known as the Summer Statement or the Autumn Statement. Under New Labour it was called the Pre-Budget Report and it was also referred to in 2022 as a mini-budget.
History
The duty to publish two annual economic forecasts was created by the Industry Act 1975, with the first such publication occurring in December 1976. The first Autumn Statement in 1982 from Conservative Chancellor Geoffrey Howe combined the announcement of this publication with any announced changes to national insurance contributions and the Government's announcement of its spending plans (and publication of the Red Book), both of which were also made at approximately the same time in the parliamentary year.
In 1993, Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke combined the announcement of spending with the Budget, merging tax and spending announcements. Doing so moved the Budget to November. To fulfill the legal obligation to make two statements, Clarke began the practice of making a Summer Statement focusing on economic growth forecasts. Unlike the Autumn Statements preceding them and the Pre-Budget Reports that replaced them, Summer Statements took the form of debate on a motion "that this House welcomes the publication of the Government's latest economic forecast, which..." rather than as a statement to the House of Commons.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spring Statement” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.