‘Kind Cuts’ do not mean pain-free cuts…
So there has been some carping about £6 billion being a small number, a pinprick against the savage swordsmanship that awaits us over the summer.
Well the Communities part of the CLG Budget is being cut by £780m, yet it was only planned to be £4.4bn of current spending to start with.
So that is a 17.7 per cent cut to the Budget within the current year, 7.4 per cent cut headline terms, including capital spending. Good Luck Mr Pickles!
As for Transport, well you may be under the mistaken impression from the election that the political parties were having a lengthy debate about a whizzy new high speed rail line. That was the main transport election debate.
The reality of the situation is underlined by the 5.1 per cent cut to the Dept of Transport total budget within the year. Not only will Mr Hammond surely have to make do with ‘mid-speed rail’, but with that sort of figure, various spurs of Crossrail must be in trouble.
The other main loser form “this year’s cuts” include Defra facing a 5.6 per cent cut, DWP a 5.7 per cent cut, and the DCMS a 3.5 per cent cut, including a £27m cut to the Olympic Delivery Authority. In the DWP the Future Jobs Fund, a £6,500 6 month jobs subsidy, looks under threat, with the former Labour minister in charge claiming it will affect 44,000 people.
Excluding the recycling of about £200m, Vince Cable’s department will have to find 3.9 per cent in cuts, and then you get to the comparative winners: the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Cabinet Office, chancellor’s Departments, Law offices and Foreign Office with cuts of between 2.5 per cent and 3.7 per cent.
And then there’s the big winner. Most of education has been unexpectedly protected. The Chancellor says the entire Schools budget is protected, but the Education department will still face £670m of cuts.
Had education borne the same burden as other unprotected departments, that number would have been a billion pounds more. But the money has come from somewhere. The comparative ‘protection’ of education, has lead to the savage numbers elsewhere.
So where now? Well these numbers aren’t even necessarily guaranteed to be ‘efficiencies’. The money has simply been cut from the Budgets. It’s up to the departments concerned to make it all work.
In the DWP we think that means a halt to the Future Jobs Fund, in the CLG, apparently Labour’s favoured shared equity schemes are to take a £150m hit. All departments have a set of tactics including renegotiations of key contracts, not replacing civil service leavers, cutting down on 1st class train travel etc, which should help a bit. But this scale of cuts means a raft of entire programmes will go.
I myself asked the Chancellor this morning if going on about ‘protecting’ even larger swathes of public spending risked sending mixed messages to the public. The reality is that these cuts will be painful to many thousands of people. I’m not sure why the Government doesn’t say it more clearly.