Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

That was the point that I was trying to make in a speech that I made in the House the other day. If there is a deficit and you are paying interest on that deficit, it sounds like a burden, but you are paying it to the people who lent you the money and they are predominantly other British citizens, so all that you are doing is transferring part of national product from one lot of British citizens—the taxpayers—to another lot of British citizens, the lenders. You are not actually creating an intergenerational transfer. An intergenerational transfer can be made, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, pointed out quite accurately, by changing the volume of investment in any one year, which changes the growth rate of the economy and affects future income per head. A fiscal measure alone is not an intergenerational transfer.