London’s taxes are bailing out the rest of high-spend Britain
TAXES paid in London and the Southeast are paying for benefits and public spending in the rest of Britain to the tune of more than £10bn per year, according to new figures out yesterday from analysts at Oxford Economics.
In the tax year 2010-11, London and the Southeast paid a total of £10.4bn more in taxes than they received in state spending – while every other part of the country took more cash from the government than they gave.
Londoners pay 18.5 per cent of all taxes in Britain, but receive only 14.4 per cent of spending.
And the imbalance is getting worse – Oxford Economics believes London’s surplus doubled this in 2011-12, while other regions show no signs of paying their own way.
“On our estimates most UK regions were in deficit even during the peak years of economic growth in the early half of the last decade,” the study found.