This Tory leak is a disaster for the Treasury

We have never seen this level of detail on a budget situation before.

Much of what was implied or left out of the budget is stated in astonishing detail here.

It is a total disaster for the Treasury and the government, but some will argue the Tories have taken a big risk with financial confidence in publishing it.

The highlights immediately are the implied cuts, as we had reported on the very day of the budget.

The social security budget is forecast by the Treasury to reach £193bn, a staggering sum by 2013/14, and will represent nearly 12 per cent of GDP next year.

Debt interest payments will more than double to £63bn by 2013/14.

I referred to the “costs of failure” that Chancellor Brown used to calculate about the Tories in the late 1990s in an April blog post.

By this afternoon, I will be able to calculate the full cost of failure, as defined by Brown himself, of his own period as prime minister.

The numbers obviously underline the parlous state of the public finances but there are other fiscal fireworks in here such as the amount by which the fiscal rules were missed, and references to the elusive “balance scorecard” which is a spreadsheet that the treasury used to calculate the budget.

Crucially, it contains the departmental expenditure limit envelope, or DEL envelope, that we would have expected to get if there had been a spending review.

It shows considerable cuts to the budgets of spending departments in real terms from next fiscal year -0.8 per cent, -4.0 per cent for 2011/12, -1.8 per cent for 2012/13 and -3 per cent in 2013/14.

And guess what? It shows that cuts were also planned in cash terms too, with the total DEL minus depreciation reducing from £390bn to £386bn by 2013/14.

The genius Carl Emmerson at the IFS thinks that this may have been prepared to give ministers the option of having a spending review.

As it is, it gives us some opportunity to try out some never-before attempted fiscal arithmetic of our own.