Osborne hints that Libya war could be over by April

The Chancellor has hinted that ministers do not expect the war in Libya to last much longer than a month.

George Osborne told the House of Commons on Tuesday that the cost of military operations against Colonel Gaddafi “will be in the order of tens of millions of pounds, not hundreds of millions”.

Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute told Channel 4 News this week his “rough” estimate, based on the cost of maintaining a no-fly zone over Kosovo, was that Britain was spending around £2 million a day on air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces.

Other experts have put the daily cost higher, at £3 million.

If Treasury officials are working on similar estimates, Mr Osborne’s words suggest the Government expects the campaign to be over in four to six weeks from now.

The Chancellor confirmed that the additional costs of operations in Libya will be fully met from Treasury reserves, as would normally be the case with major conflicts.

His announcement ended speculation that the Treasury had been urging the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to finance operations in Libya from its own budget.

Shortly before Mr Osborne spoke in the Commons, the MoD was still saying that the decision on which department would shoulder the financial burden of the war had yet to be decided.

A spokesman said: “We don’t know how much it will cost because we don’t know how long it will last, and no one does.”

But Mr Osborne gave the clearest indication yet that the Government has now calculated a timescale for military operations when he answered a question from Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the treasury select committee.

The Chancellor said: “The House will understand that it is too early to give a robust estimate of the costs of the operations in Libya, but I can say that they should be modest compared with some other operations, such as Afghanistan.

“The MOD’s initial view is that they will be in the order of tens of millions of pounds, not hundreds of millions.

“I can tell the House today that whatever they turn out to be, the additional costs of operations in Libya will be fully met from the reserve.”

Read more - Libyan campaign 'is costing Britain millions a day'

The MoD has to make cuts of £4.7bn over four years after last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review.

Professor Chalmers said there would now be some “creative thinking” at the MoD to get the most out of the extra funding, while the Treasury will be keen to keep spending to a minimum.

He said: “The Treasury will fund costs that would not otherwise have been incurred.

“So they will be looking carefully at things like extra fuel costs, and how much fuel would have been used on training flights anyway.

“It is only if they were flying more than they would have.

“And there will be a grey area if, for example, we lost a Tornado. That is potentially a lot of money, but we are phasing them out anyway, so the argument would be that there wouldn’t be a need to replace them.”