The Way the Money Goes: The Fiscal Constitution and Public Spending in the UK

The Way the Money Goes traces out what happened to the UK’s fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments (Conservative, Labour, Conservative/Liberal Democrat) from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book tells the story of what happened under each government and combines narrative with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to ’crowdsource’ ideas for spending cuts. It also includes chapters devoted to different domains of spending control, namely capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting, and the development of new accounting metrics.

This book is based on over 120 in-depth interviews of civil servants and ministers who were involved in public spending over the period, as well as documents from the same timeframe. It explores how and why, despite much talk of change and reform in everything from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes, many of the underlying features of the UK’s fiscal constitution persisted, including arrangements for formula-funding of the different countries within the union designed as a temporary stopgap in the transition to devolution. To put UK developments into perspective, the book includes a discussion of how the UK system was rated in reports from international bodies over the period, which suggests that in such exercises the more ’political’ parts of the fiscal constitution were rated differently from the more ’technocratic’ parts. Given several volcanic-type political eruptions in the UK over recent years, the book concludes by exploring some different possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of those and other possible eruptions to come.

Christopher Hood, Visiting Professor, Blavatnik School of Government, Maia King, Lecturer in Economics, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, Iain McLean, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford, Barbara Maria Piotrowska, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London

Christopher Hood has taught public administration on three continents over four decades. He has authored, co-authored or edited 27 books and won five awards for research including the American Political Science Association’s John Gaus Award in 2021, the UK Political Studies Association’s Mackenzie book prize, the H. George Frederickson award from the Public Management Research Association and an honorary doctorate from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Maia King is a Lecturer in Economics at King’s College London. Her research explores the political economy of institutions and foreign aid, public finance and economic policymaking, and social and economic networks. Prior to joining KCL, she was a researcher at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She received her PhD in economics from Queen Mary, University of London. Maia is a former HM Treasury official, and previously worked in Madagascar and Liberia as an ODI Fellow.

Iain McLean has worked on UK public policy since his time as an elected member of Tyne & Wear County Council (1973-9). Most recently, he was a Commissioner of the Fiscal Commission for Northern Ireland. He has held posts at Newcastle, Oxford and Warwick universities and visiting posts at various US universities including Stanford and Yale. Other academic interests include Enlightenment (Scottish, American, and French) political thought, and political applications of public choice and social choice theory.

Barbara Maria Piotrowska is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London (KCL). Her work focuses on the role that ideology plays in motivating civil servants and public sector workers, with a particular focus on government and regime changes. Prior to joining KCL, she worked as a researcher at the Blavatnik School of Government (University of Oxford) and taught at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Barbara received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester (NY, USA).