Nicola Smith
100 police stations are reportedly facing closure as a result of spending cuts.
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Nicola Smith
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Owen Tudor
According to the Sky News report of a Nick Clegg public question and answer session on Saturday, the Deputy Prime Minister
“confirmed he was looking into the option of introducing a financial transaction tax – or so-called Robin Hood tax – on banks as a way of generating extra funds.”
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Nicola Smith
Community Care are reporting that the Youth Justice Board (YJB) is to be axed.
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Nicola Smith
Lambeth council has announced that it is cutting free fireworks displays to save money.
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Richard Exell
A new study by John Hills shows that the last government’s spending held back rising inequality and that cutting it is likely to be regressive. At the same time, an evaluation of the 1990s cuts in Sweden and Canada – often cited by the coalition as an inspiration – reveals that they led to significant increases in poverty and inequality.
I’m referring to a couple of articles by Daniel Pimlott that appeared on the Financial Times website this evening. Normally I’d just link, but as they’re behind a paywall, and they’re so excellent, I thought it would be worth briefly summarising them.
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Paul Gregg on social mobility and spending cuts
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Richard Exell
People arguing the case for cuts will sometimes claim that recent international experience shows that “spending cuts adopted to reduce deficits have been associated with economic expansions rather than recessions.” The quotation comes from a paper published last year by Alesina and Ardagna (subscription) that lists examples where it is claimed that countries that carried out a large-scale deficit reduction were rewarded with economic expansion and a falling debt-to-GDP ratio.
A paper published yesterday by the Roosevelt Institute studies these examples and finds that they show nothing of the sort. In fact, cutting during a slump “often results in lower growth and/or higher debt-to-GDP ratios. In very few circumstances are countries able to successfully cut during a slump, and this happens only when either interest rates and/or the exchange rates fall sharply.”
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Nicola Smith
Evidence is growing on the impacts of local area grant cuts for local services. For example, in Westminster two early years centres are facing cuts of around £90,000 each and in Birmingham 36 frontline workers from the children’s services department are facing redundancy.
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Nicola Smith
Today the National Housing Federation has published research on the impacts that a 40 per cent cut to the Supporting People programme could have. The programme aims to “provide housing related support to vulnerable people to enable them to live more independently”.
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Nicola Smith
I have a post up at Left Foot Forward considering the mystery of DWP’s statistics on workless households. Over the course of recent weeks we have been told that 23, then 7 and then 4 per cent of households in London have never had a job, and that workless student households are part of a problem that the country needs to “tackle now”. Could politicians be putting a party-political spin on statistical information?