How hard can it be?
The idea behind this site, and the person who had it.
I built this because I saw that the deficit was running at about 4% of national income — close to 10% of what the government actually spends — and thought: how hard can it be to cut that out of your household spending? Most of us have done something like it at some point.
So I set out to find where I could cut the spending, or raise the taxes, and see how simple it would be. Turns out it was far more challenging than I first thought.
Three quarters of the money goes on pensions, benefits, health, education and debt interest. The budgets everyone argues about are the small ones.
That is the point of the two pages here. The Nation's Wallet shows where the money comes from and where it goes. Balance the Books hands you the sliders and lets you try to close the gap yourself.
What this site is not
It is not party political. There is no argument here about which cuts are right or wrong and which taxes are fair, only what each one is worth and who it touches. You will reach your own conclusions, and two people can use these numbers to argue opposite cases. You can also start to see how some of the figures can be shown to argue a point, when the reality is actually something quite different.
It also isn't an economic model. I haven't tried to capture how cutting spending or changing taxes feeds back into the economy and therefore into the government's income. If you raise a tax rate, people change what they do, and beyond some point you collect less rather than more — the famous Laffer curve. The tax figures here do include HMRC's own allowance for some of that behaviour, but the wider effects on growth, jobs and other tax receipts are not modelled.
What you can see, very clearly, is the scale of the challenge facing any Chancellor, of any party. The arithmetic doesn't care who is doing it.
I hope you enjoy the experiment. Please do share your results.
About Mark Calvert
Mark Calvert is a professional engineer working in the infrastructure sector, where he leads large capital projects — budgets, trade-offs and awkward numbers are the day job. He is a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and of the Institute of Directors. This site came out of the same instinct: take a number everyone quotes and find out what's actually inside it.
If you'd like to talk about project delivery, recovering a project in difficulty, making complex data easier to read, or non-executive director roles, please get in touch.
Spotted a figure that looks wrong? LinkedIn is the quickest way to reach me.
Where the numbers come from
Everything starts from published official statistics for the 2025/26 financial year:
- HM Treasury's public spending statistics and Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses
- The Office for Budget Responsibility's public finances databank and forecasts
- HMRC's receipts statistics and its ready reckoner of illustrative tax changes
- The House of Commons and House of Lords libraries
- The Office for National Statistics, for public sector employment
Some of the finer breakdowns are not published at that level of detail, so they are estimates built from the official totals and from the growth rates the Treasury reports. Every one of those is labelled as an estimate on the page itself, with the method explained in the notes at the bottom. If you think one is wrong, I would genuinely like to hear about it.