Tim Page

It appears from the headlines that one of the few winners from today’s Comprehensive Spending Review was the science budget. The Chancellor, George Osborne, announced that the science budget has been frozen in cash terms, at £4.6bn per year. It is, indeed, welcome that Vince Cable and David Willetts, the Business Secretary and Science Minister, have argued the case for science as a major engine of economic growth in recent months and seem to have had their voices heard.

That isn’t the whole story, of course. The BBC’s Science Correspondent, Pallab Ghosh, estimates that a frozen cash budget amounts to a real terms cut of 10% over four years. We are still in for tough times ahead.

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Nicola Smith

A number of complex Tax Credit changes have been announced in today’s CSR. We will be undertaking more comprehensive analysis of their impacts over the next few  hours and days. But for now the key point is that despite new increases in the value of Child Tax Credit (worth £30 a year in 2011/12 and £50 a year in 2012/13 – at total cost to the Treasury of £560 million by 2014/15) there have been cuts worth £1.4 billion in Tax Credit payments for families more widely.

These include a 10% cut in the childcare costs that working families can expect be covered by Tax Credits, a freeze in the annual value of several Tax Credit elements and a requirement that couple households with children are engaged in 24 hours or work (compared to the current 16) before qualifying for Working Tax Credits (and consequently any childcare support at all) at all.

Update: Budget 2006 increased the proportion of childcare costs that Tax Credits could meet from 70% to 80%. Today’s CSR has reversed that move. This means that families with weekly childcare costs of £300 (the maximum payable for a low-income family with 2 children) will lose £30 a week. The CSR’s equalities impact assessment states that “The reduction in support through the childcare element of tax credits…will particularly affect women in lone parent households. “

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Join us over at Left Foot Forward for a liveblog and discussion of George Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review. Kicking off now…

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• Video from today’s lobby of Parliament
  Thousands turned out for the rally and lobby today, ahead of the CSR. Here's a quick video showing some of the activity.
• Pensions tax relief plans: a fairer system or a perk for the super-rich …
  Nigel Stanley has an article over at the Guardian Money blog on pensions tax relief for the super-rich. He doesn't much like it.

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Sam Royston

Most of the noise and fury in the media over the Government’s announcements about welfare changes has been directed at the impact of unfair cuts to child benefit on higher earning families.  However, it is some of the poorest families on out of work benefits who will be most severely affected by welfare cuts effected through caps on welfare payments for out of work families.

Last week the Chancellor announced that benefit payments would be capped at £26,000 per year (or £500 per week) for out of work households, with only families entitled to Disability Living Allowance, and War Widows Pension exempt. Treasury figures estimate that these caps would affect 50,000 families.  Family Action’s research report “The cap doesn’t fit”, shows that the caps would particularly affect large families and those living in London.  Contrary to Government intentions to promote stable relationships, the caps will also introduce a substantial couple penalty into the benefits system.

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Paul Nicolson

The decision to cap housing benefit is a spectacular example of economic injustice. It continues decades of the disintegration of economically mixed communities, and hits the poorest households below the belt – while protecting the speculators and landlords who profit from high rents and therefore high housing benefit.

I was a Parish priest in a beautiful village in the Chiltern Hills from 1982 to 1999. Most people have seen it on television, where it is called Dibley. During that time, a combination of the sale of council houses and private speculation ended the mixed community of rich, middle class and poor. The right to buy led to the sale of council houses to sitting tenants for £25,000 they are now being sold on at around £250,000; the villagers’ rented cottages were bought by a speculator in the 1940s and sold off for a fortune every time a tenant died. You have to raise at least £400,000 to live in Dibleyland now unless you are a servant, a farm labourer or a vicar in tied houses.

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Richard Exell

Fifty thousand companies in the sectors most at risk from public spending cuts (construction, IT, recruitment, advertising and business services) according to insolvency practitioner Begbies Traynor. The company’s latest Red Flag Alert shows that overall, there are 123,000 companies suffering significant or critical financial problems; those with critical problems have debts totalling more than £57 billion.

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Dylan Kneale

On October 20^th, the government is to set out its agenda for the Spending Review by outlining where it intends to make £83bn of cuts. In the run up to this, many details of the proposed cuts have been leaked to the media.

Last week, we learned that the higher education cuts were likely to amount to almost two-fifths of the total budget and almost four fifths of the higher education teaching budget. Over the weekend, there were reports that the defence budget would remain relatively unscathed due to the lobbying of the Secretary of State for Defence against cuts to his budget, while further cuts could be expected to the child benefit bill. Benefit cheats are also in the Chancellor’s firing line, although this latter focus is expected to make little difference to offsetting the total deficit.

With Wednesday fast approaching, a new report by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) finds evidence that the cuts are publicly perceived as being unfair, particularly among those beginning their working lives, as well as those entering retirement.

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Ed Matthew

Where will the funds for a green recovery come from? In a startling report last week, Ernst & Young revealed that the UK is facing an energy finance crunch. We need £450 billion to finance new energy supply infrastructure and energy efficiency measures by 2025. But traditional sources of capital are only likely to deliver £50-80 billion. We fear that tomorrow’s spending review will leave us stranded without the funding needed for green growth.

Ernst & Young identified an energy finance gap of £370 to £400 billion. That means up to 10 times more investment is required than will be supplied by business as usual. They concluded that a Green Investment Bank was essential to help bridge that gap by sharing the risk of investment with the private sector and leveraging in high levels of private capital.

Yet we hear today that Treasury officials are pushing for a £2 billion “fund” to be created instead of a £4-6 billion green banking institution.

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Nigel Costley

So the greenest government ever has bottled out of the Severn Barrage, potentially the UK’s biggest renewable project. What a negative way to announce this. The big Cardiff to Weston Barrage may not be the best option and too expensive but we must find a way to harness the power of the Severn tides. And we can’t delay in exploring all the options.

Lots of work has been done in starting to figure out the impact on the birds and marine life, the sediment, the port and the economy. Trade unions have their concerns about a bloody big dam but the work has drawn out alternative ways to generate power from the second highest tidal range in the world. This should not be put on hold for the next decade while we build new nuclear and gas stations.

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