Track the pillars that matter to you, and build your own view of how Britain should spend its money and raise its taxes — then see how each compares to reality.
You haven't followed any pillars yet. Open any pillar page and click "Follow this pillar" to add it here — it's saved in this browser, no account needed.
You have 100% to allocate across categories, and every slider starts at what Britain actually spends today, so you can see exactly how big a change you're making as you drag — not guess blind. Drag the ⠿ handle to reorder by priority, and move a slider to change a category's share of your budget; increase one and your total rises above 100% until you take an equivalent amount from somewhere else, same as a real budget. We translate your 100% into real terms as you go — % of GDP and £bn/yr — using 40.8% of GDP as today's actual total for everything adjustable. Debt interest (3.6% of GDP, below) is fixed — it's the cost of borrowing already done, not a lever available this year. That 40.8% figure currently sums to slightly more than Britain's official total spending (44.7% of GDP) due to a known local/devolved government double-counting issue — see the Public Spending Overview for the full explanation. Treat this as approximately right, not exact.
This tool is designed to make trade-offs visible, not to let you "solve" the budget with a single lever — it isn't a governing simulation, it's meant to make you engage with what a real choice actually costs elsewhere. It's tempting to assume there's one easy fix hiding in a small, symbolic line item. The numbers below tell a different story: the categories most people reach for first are a fraction of the size of welfare, health, and pensions — moving any of the big three by even a little means a real trade-off somewhere else, every time.
Same mechanic, the other direction. You have 100% to allocate across how Britain raises tax revenue, and every slider starts at what each source actually raises today. Drag the ⠿ handle to reorder by priority, and move a slider to raise more or less from a source; increase one and your total rises above 100% until you take an equivalent amount from somewhere else — unlike spending, which government can fund by borrowing, this tool keeps the total fixed, because a tax mix that doesn't balance isn't really a choice about tax mix. We translate your 100% into real terms as you go — % of GDP and £bn/yr — using 33.0% of GDP as today's actual total for everything adjustable. Non-tax income & accounting adjustments (6.6% of GDP, below) is fixed — it isn't set by a tax rate you could vote to change.
This tool uses the taxes that already exist rather than inventing new ones, and it assumes a straight-line relationship between a source's share and the revenue it raises. Real tax changes rarely work that way — raise a rate and people can change what they buy, sell, hold, or declare, and modelling that behavioural response properly is a genuinely hard economic question, not something a slider can capture. Treat the result as a way to see the relative scale of each tax, not a costed policy.
The two tools above each redistribute a fixed pot — raising one category always means cutting another in the same tool. Real budgets don't have to work that way: a government can spend more without cutting anything else, but only by raising more in tax or borrowing the difference. This view unlocks every slider so it moves on its own, and tracks the gap between total spending and total revenue as you go — starting from today's actual £143bn deficit (5.0% of GDP). Move Defence up without touching anything else, and watch the deficit grow. Every slider here shares the same scale, so a bar's length means the same thing in either panel — and this view stays synced with your choices in the two tools above, live, so changes you make there show up here without a reload.