Britain borrows nearly 25 billion pounds weeks before the Budget

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The British state spent £24.5 billion more than it raised in September — £1.9 billion ahead of the Office for Budget Responsibility's forecast and above the £24.1 billion economists had predicted — in the run-up to Chancellor John Healey's first Budget. Public sector net debt passed £3 trillion for the first time. Debt interest alone came to £10.9 billion, the largest September figure on record.

The figures describe a state with no difficulty finding money. What it struggles to deliver is anything solid. A public company building the country's high-speed railway was required to erect a roughly one-kilometre covered structure alongside the line at Sheephouse Wood so that rare Bechstein's bats would not collide with trains. The roof cost £100 million, became widely known as the "bat tunnel", and was imposed by Natural England, an independent regulator. EDF Energy's new nuclear station in Somerset, which draws cooling water from the Severn Estuary, has agreed to low-velocity intake heads, a fish recovery-and-return system and an acoustic deterrent — underwater speakers, nicknamed the "fish disco", that steer fish away from the pipes. The speakers alone cost about $66 million; the full fish-protection package more than $926 million.

Francis Fukuyama has a name for the machinery behind such numbers: vetocracy, rule by veto, a system with so many points at which organized minorities, courts, agencies, legislators or interest groups can block action that majorities struggle to govern. He distinguishes constraints, which protect liberty from overreach, from capacity, the ability to build without being buried under regulations. The Austrian-school economist Per Bylund keeps the ledger of what never appears in the accounts — the cancer hospital that cannot be expanded, the housing the young cannot find, the power station that might have brought energy costs down. The real cost of regulation, he argues, is the investments that never happen and the choices that disappear.

September's accounts, by contrast, are full. Total spending rose 5.6 per cent to £111.3 billion, driven by debt interest linked to global borrowing costs that followed the conflict in the Middle East; net social benefits rose £1.6 billion to £30.6 billion. Inflation reached an eleven-month high of 3.5 per cent, partly on fuel costs. The Item Club calculates that higher gilt yields have left the Chancellor between £10 billion and £15 billion of headroom against his primary fiscal rule; the Resolution Foundation notes borrowing is already off track this year. The ONS observes that debt, at 94 per cent of GDP, stands at levels last seen in the early 1960s. Next week's Budget is expected to raise bank taxes.

The state that produced these numbers can locate £24.5 billion in a month for interest and benefits. Its high-speed railway became nationally known for a £100 million roof over a wood full of rare bats.