Nicola Smith
Some further information has emerged on how departmental spending budgets will be cut.
DCMS have announced that their £61 million of cuts will include taking £27 million from the Olympic budget, a cut of £5 million for the Arts Council and the less specific committments to cut 3 per cent from all ‘bodies in the DCMS sector” and a 3 per cent cut to the Department’s core budget.
Nicola Smith
Cuts Watch is intended to provide an analysis of where the Coalition’s cuts are being made and what impact they are having – we will be using this section of the blog to post as much information as we can find on exactly how services and funding are being affected.
Today’s announcements have provided some more detail on where cuts will fall this year:
Adam Lent
I have a piece on Comment is Free today lamenting the “cuts-mania” afflicting Europe and the UK. And here’s a very good article by US economist Thomas Palley on what the ECB and European Governments should really be doing which he calls the “green cheese” solution or possibly the “bear squeeze”!
Iain Murray
The main cuts to education and skills announced today comprise £200M from the higher education budget, £200M from the budget for the Train to Gain skills programme, and a range of ‘efficiency savings’ applied to skills quangos.
The £200M cut to Train to Gain actually involves a refocusing of this expenditure on apprenticeships and college buildings rather than a direct cut. In effect this means that the overall cut to the BIS budget of £836M is in effect scaled back to £636M. Out of the £200M saving from Train to Gain, £150M will go to creating an additional 50,000 apprenticeships. The other £50M will go to supporting capital investment in colleges.
Philip Pearson
Energy and environment programmes face cuts totalling £247m (DECC £85m; Defra £162m) – described as “making savings … which will be delivered from cutting waste and inefficiency”, and reducing lower priority programme spend. Many of these decisions will effect financial support received by the business community, including those who receive advice from, or have contracts with, the public sector.
Both departments will cut part of their funding for the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs):
Philip Pearson
News at 6am this morning that DECC is cutting £34m from business support, including closure of the Low Carbon Buildings Programme, is hitting home across the renewables industry sector. Just a week ago, the Coalition agreement stated confidently that, “We will seek to increase the target for energy from renewable sources.”
If many of us hoped that the Coalition would at least protect and perhaps at best increase the drive to a low carbon economy, this move fails the test. What’s at stake is a £3m cut in the last stage of the renewable heat element of the Low Carbon Buildings Programme (LCBP). Devices like solar water heaters, ground source heat pumps, biomass installations are being installed in their low thousands now across the UK.
Richard Exell
The Conservatives have been keen let everyone know about their love affair with the Governor of California. Perhaps that extends to cuts as well? If so, there’s a dreadful warning for us.
Back in 2007 Arnie spoke at the Conservative Party conference over a video link and David Cameron was keen to return the compliments – on a speaking tour in America:
“My wife said to me: ‘How are you going to explain to an American audience what sort of Conservative you are?’ I said: ‘I’ll say look at me and think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’.”
Nicola Smith
Many details from today’s announcement are still unclear – so far BIS is one of the only departments that has provided further detail on how spending cuts will be implemented: their committment is to achieve £836 million of cuts, which include cuts in Higher Education budgets and in training. DECC have also now posted some more information on their £85 million of cuts, which will include ‘administrative efficiencies’ and reduced regional spending, but still provide scant reference to specific programmes. The Department for Education have issued an additional press release – but it simply a re-states the £670 million cuts set out by the Treasury with no further details provided.
Adam Lent
Lovely presentations of data on the UK public finances since the war by The Guardian here. Scroll down to the table near the bottom and you notice something interesting: the period between 1946 and 1979, when the post-war social democratic consensus reined, saw only five years when the public finances were in deficit. However, since 1979 there have only been seven years when the public finances weren’t in deficit.
Unlike orthodox neo-classical economists, I prefer empirical evidence and history to theoretical models and I think that counts as a pretty strong data set. It suggests two things: