15 June 2007
The public sector faces a back-to-the-future scenario under this year's Comprehensive Spending Review, according to Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The 5% annual rises during the previous 'years of plenty' are about to be halved, he told CIPFA's annual conference in Bournemouth, in a session on 'Surviving the Comprehensive Spending Review'.
This would bring increases in current spending back to levels similar to those under John Major's Conservative government — a situation he described as 'famine, feast and now diet'.
Chote also predicted that education spending would stop growing as a share of national income and the minimum increases considered necessary for the NHS would leave nothing over for the chancellor's child poverty targets.
These measures had been forced on the Treasury by Gordon Brown's over-optimistic predictions about tax revenues, he said.
Local government expert Tony Travers also outlined a 'boom-bust' scenario, but suggested that local government might feel the squeeze less dramatically, having received a lot less during the boom years.
PFjun2007
