The UK is on track to spend £1.5 trillion per year, with much of the increase driven by debt interest, health and welfare costs, says Emma Revell

Back in 2021, my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank published an extraordinary briefing. It showed that by 2025/26, the British state was set to spend the unthinkable sum of £1 trillion per year.

Just three short years later, after Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, we published another briefing. It pointed out that, having blasted past the £1 trillion figure, we are on track to spend an astonishing £1.5 trillion by 2029/30 – a huge rise on an already gargantuan sum.

Our latest briefing, published on Sunday, used figures from departmental budgets, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Office for National Statistics to show that by next year, public spending will equate to £24,095 for every UK adult. The average salary for a full-time worker, as of April 2024, was just over £37,000. In other words, public spending per adult equates to almost two thirds the average full-time salary.

We decided to calculate our figures per adult to give a rough picture of what each taxpayer is on the hook for, as children rarely contribute much in the way of taxes. The over-65s are increasingly likely to be working and paying taxes, so we felt it right to include them. But if we’d........

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