1996 United Kingdom budget

1996 (1996) United Kingdom budget

Presented	26 November 1996
Parliament	51st
Party	Conservative Party
Chancellor	Kenneth Clarke
‹ 1995 1997›

The 1996 United Kingdom budget (officially titled A budget for lasting prosperity)^[1] was delivered by Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the House of Commons on 26 November 1996. It was Clarke's fourth budget, the last to be delivered during his tenure as chancellor, the last budget to be presented by the Conservative government of John Major before the party was defeated by Labour in the 1997 general election, and it was the last fully Conservative budget until July 2015. Prior to Clarke's budget statement being presented to the House of Commons, its contents were leaked to the Daily Mirror, which returned the document to the government but decided to print some of the details, thus helping Tony Blair, then the leader of the Opposition, to prepare his response. Clarke described his statement as one that outlined a "Rolls-Royce recovery – built to last" and predicted economic growth of 2.5% for 1997 and 3.5% for 1998, but Blair dismissed it as "a last-gasp budget of a government whose time is up".