Last month, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said it expected UK government borrowing in 2021/22 to be £127.8 billion pounds. However, borrowing in the recently ended 2021/22 financial year was a long way off at almost 20 per cent higher, according to figures just published.

For Rishi Sunak this is a problem. He is under political pressure from his own party to stump new cash and help households and businesses hit by surging inflation.  Sunak says he wants to fix the public finances after his COVID-19 borrowing surge first.

Sunak responded by saying he was committed to helping people face their immediate cost of living pressures – but repeated his plan to tackle Britain’s debt stockpile which has jumped to more than £2 trillion. His current plan is to ramp the national tax-take to the treasury to a 60 year high.

The ONS said – British public-sector net borrowing, excluding state-owned banks, totalled £151.8 billion in the 2021/22 financial year but totalled £2.34 trillion or 96.2% of GDP.

There are two tension strings pulling at the the Chacellors plans. The first is that inflation is causing a higher tax take – the second is that increased interest rates to curb inflation are ramping up government borrowing repayments. The debt interest bill of almost 70 billion pounds in the 2021/22 year was up by nearly 80% from a year earlier.

The government has said it was increasing its borrowing plans for the 2022/23 year by another £14 billion to just under £162 billion.

Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics announced that – in March alone, borrowing was £18.1 billion.

The deficit for the 12 months to March was less than half its level in the previous financial year when Britain borrowed the most it ever has in peacetime to fund its huge support for the economy during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, this most recent figure was still the third-highest on record since records began in 1947 and beat any month throughout the financial crisis for UK government borrowing.