Tory manifesto: where will the cuts fall?
Updated on 13 April 2010
Channel 4 News Economics Editor Faisal Islam asks: will the sunny optimism exuded by the Conservative manifesto be replaced by dark austerity after the election?
It is worthwhile thinking what happens if the Conservatives are elected.
On 7 May George Osborne arrives at number 11. He goes to Sir Alan Budd, the former Treasury and Bank of England economist, and asks him, as chair of the interim office of budgetary responsibility, to find out the size of any black hole in the public finances.
Budd then reports back to George Osborne, and Osborne has an emergency budget by June.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies have looked at the Conservative manifesto and they think that tax rises are maybe to come. Interestingly, there's no reference to income tax or VAT pledges in the manifesto, as there was in the Labour manifesto.
Nor is there anything about departmental budgets in the manifesto – you have to go back to previous documents for that.
We are expecting £6bn to be cut from non-priority areas in the current financial year – that’s £6bn from things like education, housing, transport, universities. That equates to a 2.8 per cent cut – that’s £3 in every £100 in those unprotected areas.
If you applied that on average to those unprotected areas, the biggest department is education, and that would work out to be a £1.7bn this year.
The Conservatives assert this can all be done from waste and inefficiency. Channel 4 News spoke to one of the efficiency gurus on Friday. He said he had laid out some detail on this but the Conservatives were yet to publish it.
