LONDON: British finance minister George Osborne's latest spending plans have a roughly 50-50 chance of being successful, the head of Britain's non-partisan Institute for Fiscal Studies said on Thursday.
Osborne stuck to his commitment of turning a budget deficit into a surplus in 2020 in a budget speech on Wednesday, confounding predictions that he would have to rein in his ambitions for putting the public finances back in the black.
"(Osborne) is going to need his luck to hold out. He has set himself a completely inflexible fiscal target -- to have a surplus in 2019/20. This is not like the friendly, flexible fiscal target of the last parliament," IFS director Paul Johnson said at a presentation.
"If he is unlucky -- and that's almost a 50/50 shot -- he will either have to revisit the spending decisions, raise taxes, or abandon the target."
Osborne has made fixing the public finances the centrepiece of his time in office since 2010. But he is only halfway through an austerity push he once planned to have completed by now.
"The first thing to say is that this is not the end of 'austerity'. This spending review is still one of the tightest in post-war history," Johnson said.
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