国际英语新闻:British gov't borrowing figures hit by higher debt repayments, inflation

LONDON, July 21 (Xinhua) -- June's British public finance figures showed the gap between income and expenditure unexpectedly widening last month.

The government borrowed 6.85 billion pounds (8.8 billion U.S. dollars) in June, which was higher than the consensus forecast of 4.8 billion pounds.

British debt accumulated so far this financial year now stands at 22.8 billion pounds since April.

The figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) released on Friday surprised on the downside, but forecasters expect that British debt will still be lower than planned for at the end of the fiscal year.

"Borrowing will total 50.3 billion pounds this fiscal year," Samuel Tombs, British economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, a London-based financial data analysis firm told Xinhua.

This is below the forecast by the independent government statistics body, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), at the time of the March government budget, and is likely to undershoot the OBR forecast of 58.3 billion pounds by about 8 billion pounds, said Tombs.

"Borrowing, however, will be much higher in the final months of this fiscal year than last year, so the OBR's forecast still looks broadly right," he said.

The rise in government borrowing was largely due to the increase in central government receipts of 7.3 billion pounds (5 percent) being outweighed by an increase in central government expenditure of 9.4 billion pounds (6 percent).

The strong growth in expenditure was partly due to the effect of higher inflation on index-linked gilt interest payments, with CPI inflation over the past year rising from 0.5 percent last May to 2.6 percent this June.

"Growth in receipts still has exceeded the 3.2 percent full-year rate forecast by the OBR in the March Budget.

"But growth in receipts will slow sharply at the end of this fiscal year, because the bumper batch of self-assessment tax receipts collected in January and February 2017, due to tax changes, will not be repeated," said Tombs. (1 British pound = 1.30 U.S. dollars)