After the post about the front loading of local government cuts I received this message from Carl Emmerson, the acting Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS): Continue reading “Front-loading services cuts, back-loading benefits cuts”
Month: October 2010
Finding previous Spending Reviews
Since the change of government, much of the content of the Treasury website has been taken down and archived – but finding it is not easy.
Below is a link that will take you here, to the archived Treasury webpages where you can find all the previous Spending Reviews. If that doesn’t work, copy and paste the link below into your browser:
I haven’t tried all the links to the previous Reviews, but the ones I have sampled all seem to work. If any don’t, please let me know as I’m pursuing this with HM Treasury and the National Archives as a serious practical breach of freedom of information. If you search for Spending Reviews on the Treasury or the National Archives website you can’t find them directly.
Front loading Local Government cuts?
A colleague in local government tells me that I missed the front-loading of the local government cuts in SR2010. Continue reading “Front loading Local Government cuts?”
Treasury Trips Up over Child Benefit
The Treasury and HMRC are apparently in turmoil over the attempt to impose a cut in Child Benefit for higher rate tax payers. Read this excellent piece by Iain Martin on the Wall Street Journal website. Who says “implementation” is a trivial matter?
Treasury Tricks
Gordon Brown was notorious as Chancellor for announcements that looked and sounded good on the day, only to unravel as theatrics and wheezes became apparent as experts got to examine the figures. He managed to turn ‘the devil is in the detail’ from a infrequently used aphorism into an Iron Law of Budgets. Continue reading “Treasury Tricks”
Plan B: Spending Review 2012
One question being constantly put to the Coalition government is what’s plan B? The Spending Review plans are massively ambitious not just in reducing public spending but also in setting out plans for most of public spending up to 2014-15. What happens if things change, or this doesn’t work? Continue reading “Plan B: Spending Review 2012”
OBR and Mr Osborne: If you have to say you’re a Lady….
I was fascinated by the fact that every time George Osborne mentions the Office of Budget Responsibility he prefaces it with the word “independent”, almost to the extent you could easily think it was actually called the Independent Office of Budget Responsibility. Continue reading “OBR and Mr Osborne: If you have to say you’re a Lady….”
The Insecurity Plan
If there is one word that sums up yesterday’s Spending Review it is insecurity. Today Britain is a much less secure place to be than it was yesterday, nationally, socially and individually. And by the time the Spending Review is implemented in full we will all be feeling much less secure – we really will be ‘all in it together’. (“It” being the operative word). Continue reading “The Insecurity Plan”
The Dog that Didn’t … Where’s the OBR?
More on the spending review later, but first I’ve just been hunting for the independent forecasts from the OBR on the public finances and I can find… nada. Continue reading “The Dog that Didn’t … Where’s the OBR?”
Target Watch
Targets are a Bad Thing (1). So says this government, at least, and they have promised to make an even bigger bonfire of targets than the one for quangos. Public Service Agreements, the pinnacle of the New Labour system that set targets for government ministries introduced in 1998, are no more. Their cousins, Departmental Strategic Objectives, introduced in 2007, are also history. Continue reading “Target Watch”
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