I SUGGESTED last week that the new gross domestic product (GDP) figures would be important, and this was without foreknowledge of the complete rewriting of recent economic history the statistics would bring.

This is not the time for a dissection of the new figures. It is, to be frank, a little tiresome, and I suspect the Bank of England will take the same view.

Having been told it cut interest rates in July when the economy was apparently quite strong — not weak as the initial figures showed — it will be inclined to look askance at the new GDP data.

That means interest rates are likely to rise gradually in the coming months as the global economy strengthens, as was the case before. It also means, unless I’ve misread it, that the monetary policy committee won’t want to be seen making a knee-jerk reaction by raising rates as early as this week.

The new data show that growth has been stronger and better balanced than first appeared, but the public finances are in a worse state. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it: “Every silver lining has a cloud.”

The current budget deficit for the first five months of the fiscal year, originally put at £11.4 billion, is £14.3 billion. The figures confirm that the government is putting a lot of extra public spending in and getting only a small increase in output out.

So if there was a black hole in the public finances before, it remains. The question is: how will it be filled? Having seen the Brown-Blair joust at first hand in Bournemouth last week, two things struck me.

The first is that Labour sees its achievements in terms of public spending programmes. Ahead of the Blair speech it felt like a parallel universe when the audience around me, encouraged by the cheerleaders, wildly applauded such weedy achievements as “free bus passes for the over-60s in Scotland” as they appeared on the giant screens.

The second was that, for all the Treasury’s tough talk to other departments, there is not going to be an abrupt clampdown in public spending. Gordon Brown did not promise any new money beyond what is in the current projections but he did not suggest any early cutbacks either.

So if extra taxes are going to be needed, where will they come from? The emerging worry in Britain’s housing industry, particularly the mortgage lenders, is that they are next in line.

The reasoning goes like this. The Treasury has been disturbed by the fact that, having delivered overall economic stability since 1997, it has had to endure an old-fashioned boom in house prices.

Two Treasury reviews, by Professor David Miles of Imperial College, London, and Kate Barker of the Bank’s monetary policy committee, are examining whether changes in the mortgage market or in new housebuilding could make housing less boom-prone.

Miles is examining the market for long-term fixed-rate mortgages, while Barker is looking at the juxtaposition of the lowest levels of new housing supply since the 1920s and a boom in house prices.