(Bloomberg) -- George Osborne’s austerity program after the Conservative party came to power in 2010 cost the UK economy more than 2% in lost GDP, according to newly published Bank of England research.

BOE analysis from 2015 released Thursday showed the tight public spending plans and tax increases imposed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer to fix the public finances after the 2008 financial crisis pulled down the level of GDP by “a little over 2%” by 2015.

His subsequent goal to balance the books, announced in the July 2015 budget, would have lifted the total cost to “nearly 3%” of GDP by 2017, about £75 billion ($95.4 billion) in today’s money, the BOE said. 

The damage would have been roughly the same as the BOE’s estimate that Brexit cost the UK 3.25% in forgone growth. Osborne never got a chance to follow through on his 2015 budget plans since he lost his job in the wake of the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union.

The paper is remarkable because the BOE usually refrains from commenting on fiscal policy. The Treasury had no immediate response.

The findings by Britain’s central bank feed into a concerns that the UK faces another round of austerity after the election later this year. The government plans to cut public spending to 2019 levels and is on track to lift the tax burden to a record high in its effort to stabilize the nation’s escalating debt burden. The opposition Labour Party has indicated it will stick to roughly the same plan.

The 2015 BOE paper, released with a batch of documents under transparency arrangements struck in 2014, acknowledged that some of Osborne’s austerity had been necessary to bring the public finances under control. 

“The government needed to cut back spending in response to structurally lower tax receipts” because it “could not plausibly continue running” huge deficits indefinitely, the BOE document said.

However, the former Chancellor went further than required, imposing a “degree of fiscal tightening over above what the government needed to do in response to the supply hit” caused by the financial crisis, the analysis said. Osborne’s “discretionary” austerity knocked about 1.5% off the level of GDP, the BOE estimated.

To offset that effect, interest rates had to be 1 percentage point lower than otherwise, the BOE said. It stressed: “Of course, our estimates of the effects of the consolidation are highly uncertain, and there are a number of risks to our treatment.”

--With assistance from Andrew Atkinson.

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