By Alex Klaushofer
Ministers and Opposition leaders have traded renewed accusations about each party’s failure to be upfront about its plans for public spending.
New Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne told the CBI’s public services summit on June 16 that the government faced ‘tough choices’ when making public spending decisions. He promised it would ‘plot a safe course back to fiscal harmony’, which would halve the deficit within five years.
But the minister – who, as second-in-command at the Treasury, will be heavily involved in public spending decisions – refused to give details of where cuts might fall.
‘One year into a Comprehensive Spending Review is not the right time to write a Budget for the year after the Olympics,’ he said. ‘There is still too much uncertainty.’
‘We don’t have an ideological commitment to shrink the state,’ he added, in a swipe at the Conservatives.
The comments follow the row that has been playing out between Labour and Conservatives in the media – and at Prime Minister’s Questions on June 17 – about how far each party’s spending plans will involve cuts to services.
Labour has pledged to increase spending by 0.7% from 2011, while the Conservatives promise real-terms increases for the health service and international aid. In a piece for The Times, shadow chancellor George Osborne accused the government of dishonesty in refusing to talk about cuts.
Byrne’s Conservative counterpart, Philip Hammond, also speaking at the summit, said that his party was committed to telling ‘the truth about the consequences of the fiscal crisis’.
‘If Liam Byrne fudged that issue, then I’m sorry that he did that, because I think that is simply delaying for political reasons the moment when the real debate about how we can protect public services can begin,’ he said.
But when asked about cuts, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury said that, while the Conservatives would be ‘looking at every programme and work stream in government’, they hadn’t yet written the 2010 Budget.
Rather than taking a ‘salami slice’ approach, which aims to cut every departmental budget, the Conservatives favoured innovation to ‘re-engineer in order to deliver the outcomes we are seeking to deliver, but in a more cost-effective way’, he said.
Local Government Association chief executive John Ransford predicted that the fiscal crisis would affect public services for the next two decades. ‘One of my concerns is that local government, councillors and officers have not all grasped the urgency of this,’ he said.
Ministers and Opposition leaders have traded renewed accusations about each party’s failure to be upfront about its plans for public spending.
New Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne told the CBI’s public services summit on June 16 that the government faced ‘tough choices’ when making public spending decisions. He promised it would ‘plot a safe course back to fiscal harmony’, which would halve the deficit within five years.
But the minister – who, as second-in-command at the Treasury, will be heavily involved in public spending decisions – refused to give details of where cuts might fall.
‘One year into a Comprehensive Spending Review is not the right time to write a Budget for the year after the Olympics,’ he said. ‘There is still too much uncertainty.’
‘We don’t have an ideological commitment to shrink the state,’ he added, in a swipe at the Conservatives.
The comments follow the row that has been playing out between Labour and Conservatives in the media – and at Prime Minister’s Questions on June 17 – about how far each party’s spending plans will involve cuts to services.
Labour has pledged to increase spending by 0.7% from 2011, while the Conservatives promise real-terms increases for the health service and international aid. In a piece for The Times, shadow chancellor George Osborne accused the government of dishonesty in refusing to talk about cuts.
Byrne’s Conservative counterpart, Philip Hammond, also speaking at the summit, said that his party was committed to telling ‘the truth about the consequences of the fiscal crisis’.
‘If Liam Byrne fudged that issue, then I’m sorry that he did that, because I think that is simply delaying for political reasons the moment when the real debate about how we can protect public services can begin,’ he said.
But when asked about cuts, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury said that, while the Conservatives would be ‘looking at every programme and work stream in government’, they hadn’t yet written the 2010 Budget.
Rather than taking a ‘salami slice’ approach, which aims to cut every departmental budget, the Conservatives favoured innovation to ‘re-engineer in order to deliver the outcomes we are seeking to deliver, but in a more cost-effective way’, he said.
Local Government Association chief executive John Ransford predicted that the fiscal crisis would affect public services for the next two decades. ‘One of my concerns is that local government, councillors and officers have not all grasped the urgency of this,’ he said.
