Richard Exell
If you turn to page three of the Treasury press release that sets out the government’s list of cuts you’ll find that they plan to save
“£320m from ending ineffective elements of employment programmes, including ending further rollout of temporary jobs through the Young Person’s Guarantee (the ‘Future Jobs Fund’) and removing recruitment subsidies from the ‘Six-Month Offer’.”
Alice Hood
The cuts package announced this morning includes £683m from this year’s Department for Transport budget. PA are reporting that this will include a £100m cut in Network Rail spending, £108m from the Transport for London budget (which could hit London Underground upgrades), a £309m reduction in DfT grants to local authorities and deferral of some local road investment schemes, with the bulk of the rest coming from within the department. The cut in local government grants will combine with the massive reduction in local government grants from across government, likely to hit local services and provision for the most vulnerable across the board.
Nicola Smith
The term ‘quango‘ is a euphamism – non-departmental public bodies carry out a range of essential work across Government and cuts will have as large an impact on delivery here as they would anywhere else – in areas including education, equalities and regional development.
Today’s announcement suggests that £270 million will be cut from Regional Development agencies. This appears to be part of the £600 million will be cut from ‘quangos’ – with rumours suggesting that organisations including the QCA and the Young Person’s Learning Agency are also in line for severe cuts or abolition and confirmation that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency BECTA will be closed.
Brendan Barber
The £6.2bn of spending cuts announced by the Government today are deeply worrying. With the UK economy and the economies of our trading partners in Europe so fragile, this is not the right time to be cutting back.
According to the Treasury document, the Government intends to save:
“£320m from ending ineffective elements of employment programmes, including ending further rollout of temporary jobs through the Young Person’s Guarantee (the ‘Future Jobs Fund’) and removing recruitment subsidies from the ‘Six-Month Offer’.”
Nicola Smith
The Coalition Government has announced that it is cutting the entire Child Trust Fund – going further than the plans set out in the Conservative manifesto to retain it for families on the lowest incomes. From 1st August payments will be ‘scaled back’ – reduced to £50 for ‘better off’ families and cut from £500 to £100 for lower income families. Payments for children at age 7 will stop. From 1st January 2011 all payments will stop.
The case for the retention of the fund has been well made – cutting it shows that the Government is doing far more than reducing ‘waste’ . Today’s announcement means that children and families across the country will be worse off. And there is far more to come. While the coaltion have attempted to win positive media coverage by ‘protecting’ spending on schools, Sure Start and education this only applies to today’s ‘in-year’ cuts – families are not protected from future reductions.
Tim Page
Today is the day that we find out where the first tranche of spending cuts will hit. No doubt the TUC will have more to say on this as the day progresses. For the moment, I was struck by a story in this morning’s FT, entitled ‘Berlin prepares for 10bn euro yearly cuts’.
The meat of the story is encapsulated in the headline. These cuts will run until 2016 and will be introduced, in part, to comply with a “debt guillotine” that is written into the German constitution.
But two details are particularly interesting.
Nicola Smith
A Guardian story from Friday reported on You Gov’s finding that over two-thirds (68%) of consumers back the notion that “if someone was too poor to afford a lawyer and they had a need for serious legal advice” then “the state should pay for all their legal advice through the legal aid system”. Nevertheless, Friday also saw Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke confirming that cuts will be made to the legal aid budget, stating that he aims to “improve the service for less money”.
Adam Lent
Fresh from wrongly predicting that the bankers’ bonus tax and the 50p rate would generate no extra revenues to reduce the deficit, the Adam Smith Institute is bravely risking a hat-trick of own goals by claiming the same thing about Government plans to raise the rate for capital gains tax. This could really blow Madsen Pirie’s chances of being called up for the England World Cup squad!
Owen Tudor
Immigration has been addressed rather worryingly in the early stages of Labour’s leadership debate. It seems that the contestants are in danger of repeating or worse exaggerating the errors of New Labour’s capitulation to right-wing ideas on migration - being tough on migration rather than tough on the reasons that migration causes problems, like workplace exploitation and the scarcity of decent, cheap housing.
So it’s not surprising that the liberally-minded should claim that IPPR’s new research on global migration – Development on the Move – proves that tougher immigration controls won’t be effective in reducing migration (a claim which is only a minor point in IPPR’s own press release, but which has been the main finding to be promoted). I have only been able to access the summary so far, but it seems to me that, while it proves how useful migration is for migrants’ living standards (wealth, health and education – all good things in themselves), it doesn’t prove that tougher immigration controls will fail to control the scale of migration because it doesn’t distinguish between what is generally referred to as legal and illegal migration (albeit this is a rather crude distinction).
Owen Tudor
They’re at it again. No sooner has Conservative Andrew Mitchell taken up his post as International Development Secretary than right wingers are urging him to cut funding to unions. A right wing think-tanker, welcoming his decision to stop spending money on promoting awareness and understanding of international development in the UK, used two really sensible union projects as examples of why this sort of expenditure was ripe for cutting.