THE BRITISH BUDGET

Northern Advocate, 13 July 1925, Page 8

THE BRITISH BUDGET

PREPARATION PROCESSES.

(By H. R. S. PhilpotT.)

Chancellors of the Exchequer take on the average about two hours to deliver the speech which decides Great Britain's financial policy for the following year and passes sentence on millions of taxpayers. But to make those two hours of : speech-making possible great armies of civil servants have been working ceaselessly for the preceding five or six months. They are the real Budget makers.

A Chancellor, of coarse, lays down the broad lines of policy. He it is who decides, according to the policy ©f the Government of which he is a smember, whether his Budget i 3 to be based on Fre.e Trade or Protection, Whether it is to provide for social legislation or a big Navy and expanding Army, whether it. is to represent spending ox a saving policy, "Whether the general taxation procedure is to be one of remission or increase. And when he has done that the Treasury men, the. heads of the : grcfat departments, the InlWhff i officials, and all the rc'St' of tiie hosts of Whitehall bend qT&bjjfcheir figure!fetden desks and writfctJfnnutes by the score explaining to the Chancellor how impossible it is to do thiß; that, or the fither unless his objeati if to bring blue ruin on the country.

This procedure is began as early as October, although the Budget is'iiOt introduced until the latter days clf'ib'he following April. The -Treasury, thea eenxis a formal letter to all the departments asking them to frame estimates of their probable expenditure during the coming financial year. There are conferences in evefy Government office. Reports are sent in based on the trading policy Of the market-town cheap-jack, who . starts off. by asking a pound for an article which he would gladly sell for five shillings.

Treasury offiicals know this. They have been quietly conducting their own inquiries, and the result is that the departments are asked to inake revisions. They make them and then tliere is a game of battledore and shuttlecock, which extends o-ver weeks. Estimates are passed backwards and forwards, amended and whittled down. Officials grow red in the face, and begin to mjss their usual trains home. Eventually, by about the end of February. one-half of the Budget problem has been determined. The Chancellor is confronted by the bill he' has to meet during the coming year.

All this time other officials have •been busily working lout possible income. The Inland Revenue and Customs, experts have been preparing estimates of how. much their departroents may be expected to produce on the existing basis of taxation. The City has been "sounded." Great lumping experts have been called into conference. .Authorities On trade prospects have: submitted memoranda. At long last the Chancellor has presented to him a sort of balance-sheet. It tells him what the greatest experts in the country think will be the approximate national income- and expenditure during the year' for which lie is moro particularly responsible. He is faced either with a prospective surplus or a prospective deficit-

.Happy is the Chancellor who is advised that he may expect a surplus. He can then set out on the;, popular task of reducing taxes. 111-favoured is lie'who has to meet an anticipated deficit by devising new taxes or in■creasing old ones. '

Perhaps he is a Chancellor, who has "fleilnite ideas of his own. "" \ln , that case he set?- his experts tbe delicate task of telling him how much a new tax may yield, or how much' the sweeping away or the reduction of an old one may cost. It is'at' such, a time thai his servants become his nnasters. But his is the ultimate responsibility. When he rises'at four •o'clock in the House of Commons on Budget day, having gained the assent of his Ministerial colleagues to the proposals he is about to announce, he Irnows that the departmental tug-of-v.'iir whHi liris worried him for five or six mouths is over, but that posterity •wll 1 judge him by what he has to say in the ne::t hundred minutes. A Chancellor who achieves fame ge:ioi il ; y deserves it. But as a rule, the civil servant? who sit in the privycv of their departmental offices get the most laughs.