Is the UK’s national debt ‘now beginning to fall’?

On Sky News this morning, Conservative MP Stephen Hammond made a claim about the UK’s national debt while discussing the Autumn Statement.  

He said he wanted to see that the government “have shown that we have run the economy fiscally responsibly”, adding: “I think you’re going to see that today with some of the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] forecasts about the fact that debt is now beginning to fall.” 

We’re not entirely clear what Mr Hammond was referring to here—the OBR publishes a new set of forecasts this afternoon, though the content of these isn’t public yet. But we looked at this topic recently, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claimed earlier this month that the UK’s national debt “is falling”.

At the time, we found Mr Sunak’s claim wasn’t correct according to the latest official figures, which showed that the national debt in September 2023 had increased compared to the previous year. 

In March 2023, when it made its last set of forecasts, the OBR predicted overall public sector net debt would peak in 2023-24 and fall thereafter.  Underlying public sector net debt, the measure the government used in its target, wasn’t forecast to fall for several years. Those forecasts may change when new data comes out today, however. Earlier this month Isabel Stockton, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told us in relation to Mr Sunak’s claim: “Headline public sector net debt has just—as in, the past quarter—stabilised in cash terms, so is probably falling ever so slightly as a percentage of GDP, though we don’t actually have that quarterly GDP outturn yet.”