The £100 Question
Spend £100 of
public money.
Every pound the state spends is a choice. You have £100. Put it where you think it should go. Then see where the Treasury actually puts it, line by line, from the official 2025-26 accounts. The gap is the story.
Interest on the national debt starts at £9 and cannot go lower. That is the bill Britain already owes on money already borrowed. You can push it higher if you want to borrow more; you cannot push it down.
See it
Shares of the £1,227.6bn the public sector spent on services in 2025-26 (HM Treasury, PESA 2026, Tables 4.2 and 5.2). Whole pounds; they sum to 100. The remaining £132.5bn of Total Managed Expenditure is accounting adjustments and belongs to no line.
Understand it
Interest on the national debt cost £110.9bn in 2025-26. That is £45bn more than the whole defence budget (£65.4bn) and more than the police, courts, prisons and every road and railway in the country put together (£104.6bn). It buys no nurse, no teacher, no soldier and no pothole.
At today's prices the debt line was £70.6bn in 2019-20. Six years later it is £130.3bn on the Treasury's wider measure. It has nearly doubled, and the OBR expects it to keep rising to 2030-31.
Nobody sat down and chose this £100. It is the residue of decisions taken since 1997 and left in place after 2010: a pension settlement nobody re-examined, tax credits that turned welfare into a wage top-up, and a debt that three governments of both colours built and none paid down. Every line on this page moved because of a policy, which means every line can be moved back by one.
Fix it
The allocation you have just seen was not chosen by anyone. It was built by policy since 1997, so it can be rebuilt by policy. See the rest of the Rebuild.
Sources and method
- HM Treasury · Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2026: Table 4.2 (expenditure on services by function, 2025-26 outturn, £bn), Table 4.3 (the same in 2025-26 prices), Table 5.2 (by sub-function). Accredited Official Statistics, published July 2026.
- Office for Budget Responsibility · Economic and Fiscal Outlook, March 2026 and the August 2026 databank: debt interest £109bn in 2025-26 on the OBR's net measure, rising to £137bn by 2030-31.
- House of Lords Library · UK fiscal outlook, September 2026: Total Managed Expenditure £1,360bn (44.3% of GDP), borrowing £130bn, debt 94.1% of GDP.
| Line on this page | £bn | £ per £100 | Built from (PESA sub-functions) |
|---|
Debt interest is shown as interest actually paid on public sector debt (£110.9bn: central government £96.9bn, local government £1.1bn, public corporations £0.5bn, Bank of England £12.3bn). PESA's wider "public debt transactions" line is £130.3bn because it also carries £19.4bn of notional interest on unfunded public service pensions; that sits under Running government here so the debt line is not inflated. Defence is on the UN COFOG definition, which is lower than the NATO definition. Whole-pound figures are rounded so the ten lines sum to exactly 100; exact shares are in the table. Readers' averages are from people who have used this page, not a representative sample of the public.