Acts as chancellor,

Bank of England independence: On taking office as Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown gave the Bank of England operational independence in monetary policy, and thus responsibility for setting interest rates through the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee. He also changed the inflation measure from Retail Price Index to Consumer Price Index and transferred responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority.
Spending: Once the two-year period of following the Conservatives' spending plans was over, Brown's 2000 Spending Review outlined a major expansion of government spending, particularly on health and education. In his April 2002 budget, Brown raised national insurance to pay for health spending. Brown changed tax policy in other ways, such as the working tax credits.
Growth: An OECD report shows UK economic growth averaged 2.7% between 1997 and 2006, higher than the Eurozone's 2.1%, though lower than in any other English-speaking country. UK unemployment is 5.5%, down from 7% in 1997 and lower than the Eurozone's average of 8.1%.
Euro: In October 1997, Brown took control of the United Kingdom's membership of the European single currency issue by announcing the Treasury would set five economic tests[40] to ascertain whether the economic case had been made. In June 2003 the Treasury indicated the tests had not been passed.

Gordon Brown meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2006Gold sales: Between 1999 and 2002 Brown sold 60% of the UK's gold reserves at $275 an ounce. It was later attacked as a "disastrous foray into international asset management" as he had sold at close to a 20-year low. He pressured the IMF to do the same, but it resisted. The gold sales have earned him the pejorative nickname "Golden Brown", after the song by The Stranglers.
Spectrum auctions: Under Brown, telecom radio frequency auctions gathered £22.5 billion for the government. By using a system of sealed bids and only selling a restricted number of licences, they extracted high prices from the telecom operators. Germany at this time applied a similar auction; these together caused a severe recession in the European telecoms development industry (2001 Telecoms crash) with the loss of 100,000 jobs across Europe, 30,000 of those in the UK. But, as Paul Klemperer, one of the designers of the auctions, points out, "[t]he United States held no 3G auctions, yet telecoms companies lost just as much: in fact, they lost more." This quote however is deliberately mis-leading; and comes from a designer of the auctions as a defence. It has to be understood that American 3g services are run over conventional frequencies shared with other mobile services. Therefore the frequency auctions in the USA were not specifically for 3g frequencies. Two auctions were run in the USA, the first being cancelled and re-run (for less revenue) due to damage caused to the industry. The Americans realised their mistake and tried to rectify it. The British and German chancellors copied the North American first auction; which had failed. To copy a failed economic model is normally considered a serious error of judgement.
Debt relief and development: Brown believes it is appropriate to remove much of the unpayable Third World debt but does not think all debt should be wiped out. On 20 April 2006, in a speech to the United Nations Ambassadors, Brown outlined a "Green" view of global development.

Tax
In the 1997 election and subsequently, Brown pledged to not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax. Over his Chancellorship, he reduced the basic rate from 23% to 20%. However, in all but his final budget, Brown increased the tax thresholds in line with inflation, rather than earnings, resulting in fiscal drag. Corporation tax fell under Brown, from a main rate of 33% to 28%, and from 24% to 19% for small businesses.

In 1999, Brown introduced a lower tax band of 10%. He abolished this in his last budget in 2007 to reduce the basic rate from 22% to 20%, increasing tax for 5 million people, and, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies leaving those earning between under £18,000 as the biggest losers.


Analysis of policies as chancellor
Growth: Brown states that his chancellorship had seen the longest period of sustained economic growth in the history of the United Kingdom. The details in Brown's growth figures have been challenged.
Anti-poverty: The Centre for Policy Studies found that the poorest fifth of households, which accounted for 6.8% of all taxes in 1996–7, accounted for 6.9% of all taxes paid in 2004-5. Meanwhile, their share of state benefit payouts dropped from 28.1% to 27.1% over the same period.
Tax: According to the OECD UK taxation has increased from a 39.3% share of gross domestic product in 1997 to 42.4% in 2006, going to a higher level than Germany. This increase has mainly been attributed to active government policy, and not simply to the growing economy.
Pensions: Conservatives have accused Brown of imposing "stealth taxes". A commonly reported example resulted in 1997 from a technical change in the way corporation tax is collected, the indirect effect of which was for the dividends on stock investments held within pensions to be taxed, thus lowering pension returns and contributing to the demise of most of the final salary pension funds in the UK. The Treasury contend that this tax change was crucial to long-term economic growth.

Other policy stances as chancellor
Higher education: In 2000, Brown started a political row about higher education (referred to as the Laura Spence Affair) when he accused the University of Oxford of elitism in its admissions procedures, describing its decision not to offer a place to state school pupil Laura Spence as "absolutely outrageous".[60] Lord Jenkins, then Oxford Chancellor and himself a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said "nearly every fact he used was false."

Links with nuclear power industry
A link was reported between Brown's brother Andrew and one of the main nuclear lobbyists, EDF Energy, given the finding that the government did not carry a proper public consultation on the use of nuclear power in its 2006 Energy Review. Attention has also been drawn to the fact that the father-in-law of Brown's closest adviser Ed Balls, Tony Cooper (father of the Labour minister Yvette Cooper) has close links with the nuclear industry. Cooper was described as an "articulate, persuasive and well-informed advocate of nuclear power over the last ten years" by the Nuclear Industry Association on his appointment as Chairman of the British Nuclear Industry Forum in June 2002. He is also a member of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and was appointed to the Energy Advisory Panel by the previous Conservative administration.