By David Williams
9 September 2010
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg claimed this morning that much of the coalition government’s spending plans are ‘not radically different’ from those of the previous government.
In a speech at the Institute for Government in Westminster, Clegg sought to reassure voters that next month’s Comprehensive Spending Review would be less of a shock than many now fear.
‘Part of that is because people think this is all going to happen overnight,’ he said. ‘This is a four to five year plan. For a department which you’re asking to cut by 25%, that’s an annual reduction of about 6%. Under Labour’s plans, they wanted a 20% reduction, so that’s 5% [per year].
‘It’s not that dramatically different in some cases from what Labour were planning and also it takes place over time.’
He said he hoped this would allow public servants ‘a little bit of space’ to plan carefully, rather than panic and make wrong decisions too hastily.
The deputy prime minister also suggested that the cuts were not ideologically motivated, adding: ‘Balancing the books is something we have to do so we can then go on and do the things we want to do tomorrow.’
He also indicated that the government would take ‘ambitious’ steps to give more power for local government. This included removing more centrally imposed spending ringfences, he said, and the coalition would also ‘start to decentralise our extraordinarily over-centralised tax system’.
An announcement on a ‘deal for local government’ involving more freedom for less money would be made ‘over the next few weeks’.
Clegg called for a ‘horizon shift’ in government, and pledged that as it prepared its spending plans for the years ahead, the coalition would take decisions that were in the long-term interests of the country rather than short-term political gain.
‘We are absolutely determined that we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say we did the best we could for them,’ he said.
Clegg set out seven areas in which he said the government was already taking a longer-term approach, including a ‘renewed and reformed commitment to higher and further education, and especially world-class research and science’.
Business secretary Vince Cable announced yesterday that he would concentrate funding on ‘world-class’ research. But, future cutbacks to research that was ‘neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding’ drew fire from across the science sector.
