By bizn_fun 
But Ben Zaranko, associate director at IFS, said the current framework was judging economic sustainability by a system that is “boiled down to to a single number”.
In the Autumn Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that the amount of headroom the government has against its borrowing rules will be £22bn in five years’ time. This was more than earlier forecasts of £9.9bn.
But research from the IFS, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, suggests that instead of “pass–fail fiscal rules”, the UK “would be better served by a new framework based around a set of ‘fiscal traffic lights'”.
These would be used to monitor performance against high-level objectives and principles set out at the start of each parliament.
Zaranko said: “Moving to a broader set of fiscal indicators, assessed according to a traffic light system, would provide a better picture of the government’s overall fiscal position, and reduce the incentive for governments to contort policy in pursuit of a particular ‘headroom’ number.”
The IFS report said that the current framework is not delivering sustainable public finances and aggressive “gaming” of rolling targets and frequent changes to the rules have undermined their credibility.