Sir Keir Starmer is on track to become one of the highest-spending prime ministers in history despite planned budget cuts, new analysis suggests.
Research by the TaxPayers' Alliance think tank has predicted that the Government is expected to spend a total of £6.43 billion over the course of the current Parliament.
This is the equivalent to 45 per cent of GDP and would make Sir Keir the second-highest spending prime minister since the Second World War.
Only Boris Johnson, who spent 45.4 per cent of GDP, spent more in peacetime, with his figures distorted by the significant increase in expenditure during the Covid pandemic.
The figures suggest that Sir Keir's planned welfare cuts, as well as cuts of up to 11 per cent across government departments later this year, will only amount to a drop in the ocean.
Public spending is expected to rise to a record high of £1.27 trillion in 2025-26, which is some £23.2 billion more than spending at the height of the pandemic in 2020-21.
This will equate to 45.3 per cent of GDP, a level of state spending that has only been surpassed on a handful of occasions since the war.
These were during the pandemic, at the height of the sterling crisis and in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Public spending per household is expected to rise further under Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, rising from its current level of £43,670 to £45,184 by 2029-30.
According to the forecast, Sir Keir will preside over four of the 10 financial years with the highest levels of spending since 1948.
Mr Johnson presided over two of those, while Gordon Brown, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Lord Cameron presided over one year each.
John O'Connell, the chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "The talk of spending cuts in the upcoming Spring Statement shouldn't fool anyone given the terrifying trajectory of the size of the state.
"Even if Reeves manages to trim some of the fat on Wednesday, the reality will still be one of austerity for taxpayers and prosperity for the public sector.
"Labour must not allow some sensible decisions on quangos, government credit cards and welfare to convince them that they've done any more than the bare minimum in recent weeks."
Maxwell Marlow, the director of public affairs at the Adam Smith Institute, added that the findings "should be ringing alarm bells at the very top of government".
He said: "The Government must radically deregulate the economy, abolish wasteful quangos, cut the welfare bill - in particular the state pension - and encourage more wealth creators to come to the UK as a matter of urgency."
Despite Sir Keir and Ms Reeves promising a war on waste, the Government has created 27 quangos in the space of eight months.
Earlier this month, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, announced the abolition of NHS England and suggested that more public sector healthcare bodies could also be disbanded.
Civil servants have also had almost all of their 20,000 government credit cards frozen in a drive to cut wasteful spending.
To regain access to the cards, civil servants will need to reapply and explain why they need them, or they will be cancelled at the end of this month.
A Treasury spokesman said: "We must go further and faster to create an agile and productive state that works for people.
"That's why we're refocusing the public sector on our missions and, for the first time in 17 years, going through every penny of taxpayer money line by line, to make sure it is helping us secure Britain's future through the Plan for Change."