The last Queen's Speech of the current fixed-term Parliament was used as an opportunity for the Coalition to spell out the extent of fiscal consolidation over the current Spending Review period – and look ahead to enshrining deficit-reduction over the next five-years.

In detail provided to the policy document explaining the Queen's Speech, the Government confirmed it was on course to achieve the first part of its fiscal mandate of balancing the cyclically adjusted current budget a year earlier than planned in 2017/18.  But on the second element, public sector net debt was set to decrease as a share of GDP a year later than first forecast, in 2016/17.