No Wonder We're Skint
HMGov is giving out huge subsidies like sweets at Halloween?!?
David Turver has today posted “Subsidies Galore” on his Eigenvalues Substack.
(Well worth subscribing, by the way.)
He included this link to HMGov’s Subsidy Control Transparency Database.
I just downloaded the Excel file, as highlighted on the screengrab of the website below.
Unhelpfully, the Excel file provides the subsidy scheme budget values as text entries.
But Excel can convert text into a value using the =VALUE(K3) function, in this case converting the text in cell K3 to a value.
Doing this to the entire excel file (all 1170 rows, copy… paste) yields interesting results.
Especially if you then filter those results for Active status schemes, in descending budget value, as shown in the screengrab below.
Top row: SC10005 “UK Film Tax Relief prolongation”, HMRC, budget £2,960 Billion.
Top ten rows: total budget £3,459 Billion.
And so on.
Do I think these are accurate figures for the subsidies being dished out by BEIS / HMGov? Are they *really* that profligate with our money?
No, not really… well, I hope not, anyway…
But, in case you’re wondering if it’s an issue just with the Excel file I downloaded. Using their search fields for scheme values £90,000,000,000 [£90 Billion] to £3,000,000,000,000 [£3,000 Billion] yielded this result:
“Orchestra tax relief” £100 Billion???
I just think BEIS / HMGov are incompetent / really don’t give a damn.
And that worries the cr@p out of me.
You?
What's a few noughts between friends?
Particularly if it has no effect on your promotion prospects and the size of your pension....
From what I can gather, most public facing ‘budgets’ in the UK are done on a worst case scenario basis, whereby official numbers represent the maximum possible spend if absolutely everything goes t*ts up, rather than any actual real spending. From the perspective of this, this means the numbers you are looking at are likely in the realm of “we would hypothetically be willing to give £3tn worth of tax relief to filming in the UK before we finally throw in the towel”, not that anywhere near this has actually been spent (this is also why the press comes up with such insane numbers for projects like HS2 - it was expensive, but not *that* expensive).