Housing Expenditure

Mr. Soley
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will publish a table showing the share of total public spending taken up by housing spending (a) in Great Britain and (b) in England, in each of the years from 1974 to 1987.

Mr. Major
The table shows, for Great Britain and England, identifiable public expenditure on the housing function as a percentage of total identifiable public expenditure: --
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The term "identifiable expenditure" refers to expenditure that can be indentified from official records as having been incurred in a particular territory. Total identifiable expenditure accounts for just over 80 per cent. of total public departmental expenditure: it excludes expenditure on defence, overseas aid and other overseas services which are deemed to have been incurred on behalf of the United Kingdom as a whole. It also excludes Government net landing to, and the market and overseas borrowing of, the public corporations (including nationalised industries), due to the difficulty of allocating this finance to expenditure in a particular country.---------------------------------------------
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|Departments                                ||||||||||
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|Defence                                    |
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|Foreign and Commonwealth Office            |
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|European Communities                       |
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|Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food|
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|Trade and Industry                         |
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|Energy                                     |
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|Employment                                 |
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|Transport                                  |
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|DOE—Housing                                |
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|DOE—Other environmental services           |
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Figures prior to 1982–83 are not available on a consistent basis because of changes in definition that have taken place between different public expenditure White Papers. Figures for 1987–88 are not yet available.