The claim
“Our banking levy will have raised £10bn, reckless bonuses for short term gain will have ended, and banks will be lending responsibly again.”
Nick Clegg speech to Liberal Democrat conference 20 September 2010
The background
There’s nothing the Lib Dems like more than a bit of banker bashing – and at their conference this week they’ve been bragging about the amount they’re going to raise from the banking levy.
The levy was introduced in the Emergency Budget in June, and it’s a levy on the balance sheets of UK banks and building societies. Nick Clegg’s so keen to tell us how successful it will be that he was on the radio this morning repeating the claim that it will raise £10 bn. But how much more money will the government actually take off the banks?
The analysis
The levy will kick in at the beginning of next year – and George Osborne predicted it will rake in £2bn each year. So, over a Parliament that should add up to £10 billion, which is presumably how Mr Clegg got the figure.
But the Treasury press office told us the numbers are a bit more complicated than that. Because the levy is being introduced in January it will bring in £1.2bn next year. And beyond that it forecasts revenues of: £2.3bn in 2012-13, £2.5bn in 2013-14 and £2.4bn in 2014-15.
Beyond that (and the life of this government,) in 2015-16 a further £2.3bn is predicted for the Treasury- but the DPM can’t really claim that cash since we don’t know who’ll be in power then.
When we punched in the figures Mr Clegg can claim, FactCheck’s calculator came up with a total of £8.4bn, some £1.6bn short of Mr Clegg’s claim.
We asked the Lib Dems to explain the funding gap – we were told “it was just a rounding up for the purposes of the speech”.
The verdict
What’s £1.6 bn between coalition partners? Well, it would water Eric Pickles pot plants for another 40,000 years or buy us an extra 16,000 GPs – but in the grand scheme of government cuts, perhaps it’s not that big a slip.
So, the Deputy Prime Minister wasn’t exactly fibbing, but maybe he needs to be a more careful how high he rounds up next time.
