The Barnett formula is a mechanism used by The Treasury in the United Kingdom to adjust the amounts of public expenditure allocated to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales automatically to reflect changes in spending levels allocated to public services in England, England and Wales or Great Britain, as appropriate.
The formula is named after Joel Barnett, who devised it in the late 1970s, while Chief Secretary to the Treasury as a way of allocating additional or reduced finance based on population (and not need) as a short-term solution to minor Cabinet disputes in the runup to the planned devolution in 1979. It has been retained by Conservative Governments of 1979 to 1997 under Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, by Labour Governments after 1997 under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and the current interparty Government of David Cameron, with the Government declaring its intention to continue to use it as the basis for funding the three devolved governments.
The Barnett formula is said to have "no legal standing or democratic justification", and, being merely a convention, could be changed by the Treasury at will. In recent years, Barnett has called for a review of its long-term viability.
Read more about Barnett Formula: How The Formula Works, Controversy
Famous quotes containing the words barnett and/or formula:
“To find ways of practicing democracy, not ways of orating about it, is our great problem.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”
—Pierre Simon De Laplace (1749–1827)