Think tank attacks parties’ fiscal shortfalls
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A financial think-tank has warned that all three parties are not forthcoming with the fact that the UK faces the deepest public spending cuts since the late seventies.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies has attacked all three political parties for not being clear to voters how they will deal with the public debt problems or by how much they will cut public spending.
The study says: “It is striking how reticent all three parties have been in explaining exactly how they would go about [cuts].
“And all three parties are particularly vague about the cuts in public spending that they all think should deliver the majority of the fiscal tightening.”
The IFS says that over the four years starting in April 2011, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats would need to deliver the deepest sustained cut to spending on public services since the late seventies, but the Conservative plans imply cuts to spending on public services that have not been delivered over any five-year period since the Second World War.
It says the Tories would need to cut public services spending by £63.7bn, Labour by £50.8bn and the Liberal Democrats by £46.5bn by 2015.
But the IFS says the Tories have only announced measures that would bring about 17.7 per cent of the total cuts they need, Labour’s measures that would bring about 13.1 per cent of what it would need and LibDems have only announced 25.9 per cent of necessary measures.
Also, the think-tank says that while the Tories are keener to cut public spending faster, it would only make a “modest” difference to the long-term outlook for government borrowing and debt - it says Tory plans would return government debt below 40 per cent of GDP by 2032, the same year as it would under Labour or the Liberal Democrats.
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