Damian has released the following statement in response to today's Spending Review:
“One thing we learned in the Gordon Brown era was: whatever you think about a budget or spending review just after you’ve heard it, 48 hours later things look different – and the movement is rarely in a positive direction.
“The Chancellor’s statement today in Parliament featured plenty of positive news items – but in the 128-page document that accompanies it there are plenty of minuses too. There is a lot of detail to pore over.
“One area very significant for our area is the DEFRA (farming and rural) budget. The document shows that the department’s spend limit is facing real terms cuts of 2.7% a year. We are told that there will be a big increase in spend on Environmental Land Management schemes, but that will be paid for by “rapidly winding down” other payments. We need to understand what this means in practice – but the overall departmental cuts do not bode well.
“Elsewhere, the NHS will get an extra 3% per year of real-terms day-to-day spending growth; that is a little more than had been expected – but it remains to be seen if it is sufficient given rising costs. There was no reversal of the long delay ministers announced recently on the new Basingstoke Hospital.
“There’s a much smaller increase for schools, going up 0.4% a year in real terms. But local schools are also being asked to fund new programmes including breakfast clubs and an extension to free lunches. Budgets were already tight and we have just seen teacher numbers falling in the latest figures.
“There are a lot of wider unknowns too. The Chancellor is pinning a lot on being able to bring down asylum costs. I certainly agree with that aim, but we shall have to see how it works in practice – and what happens if it doesn’t. The statement also didn’t give us any clues how the government plans to fund their partial reversal of the winter fuel payment cut – a cut that we had been told was absolutely essential to prop up the finances.
“The biggest questions are about what happens to the economy overall. Unfortunately, we saw yet another increase this week in the unemployment rate, which is not encouraging. I will continue to press the government to reverse measures that are hampering business confidence and job creation.”
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