In my Times column this morning [£], I mentioned a little bit of research I’ve put together analysing the proliferation of non-measures in Chancellors’ Budgets over recent years. I wrote:

There is a rule of thumb in fiscal policy that says any tax or spending measure which costs or brings in less than £500 million a year is pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Granted, it’s a rough yardstick, but at the very least it gives you a kind of substance-to-spin ratio for each Chancellor.

So here, in case you were curious, are the results:

The chart above shows you what I like to call the “substance ratio” — the percentage of each Budget (or Pre-Budget Report, or Autumn Statement) which is measures worth £500m in either tax rises, spending rises or other changes. The results were all corralled from this excellent OBR spreadsheet of every policy measure since 1970.

A couple of provisos are necessary: the chart only includes Roy Jenkins’s final 1970 Budget, and it gets more detailed as time goes on, so to some extent those smaller proportions as time goes on may comes down to that. However, what you see is that although the substance ratio has fallen over time, there are some ups and downs. Norman Lamont’s Budgets tended to contain bigger measures than Nigel Lawson’s. Although Gordon Brown is often derided for filling his Budgets with micro-measures, the big watershed actually happened under Ken Clarke, who was the first Chancellor in whose Budgets less than 50% of the measures were of a decent size.

But, as I underline in my column, by far the biggest culprit in terms of micro-measures is our current Chancellor, with a substance ratio of only 15% (and falling). And before any data geeks interject, I’ve ensured that although there are some measures in his Budgets and Autumn Statements which are printed out twice in the scorecard (because they affect different areas of the balance sheet), I’ve tried to adjust for double counting.

One other way of looking at this is by counting the average number of measures in each Chancellor’s Budget (regardless of size). Here, too, there is a definite trend:

Again, bear in mind that there is only one Jenkins Budget included. And that from Gordon Brown onwards the Chancellors delivered two effective Budgets a year (the spring Budget and then the winter PBR/Autumn Statement). The above shows the average number of measures per event — not per year. So the final three bars on the right are probably a little lower than they would be in a truly comparable chart.

But note, again, that there is one big outlier: George Osborne. Never before in the field of fiscal policy has one man fitted so many miniscule policies into so few Budgets.

Congratulations, Chancellor.