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Axe falls on hospitals, schools and policing
Sri Carmichael22 Apr 2009
BILLIONS of pounds of cuts to health, education and police spending included in today's Budget will affect frontline services.
The “efficiency savings” the Chancellor announced to help plug the gaping £175 billion black hole in public finances include shortening the time patients spend in hospital and making more use of teaching assistants.
But these will not come into play until 2011 — after the next general election — and voting polls suggest this means Alistair Darling is handing a poisoned chalice to the next Tory chancellor.
Growth in public expenditure across departments was slashed from the promised 1.1 per cent to just 0.7 per cent in the next financial year. An extra £5 billion will be cut from budgets.
Mr Darling skimmed over this during his speech but the full Budget Red Book spelled out which services would suffer. The cuts include:
● £1 billion from frontline policing, partly through time-saving technology.
● £500 million from discharging patients from hospital sooner.
● £538 million from Network Rail by reducing its grant and cutting the amount spent on operation, maintenance and renewal of infrastructure.
● £650 million from education quangos and funding for sixth-formers and £307 million from a one per cent “efficiency saving” in schools, which will be encouraged to use more teaching assistants, who earn less than teachers.
● £400 million from Further and Higher Education, partly through the “re-prioritisation” of programmes.
● £144 million from the Highways Agency, including £50 million on major schemes through cheaper contractors.
● £110 million from fire service shift patterns and “crewing arrangements”.
● £50 million from Environment Agency's flood and coastal erosion risk.
The squeeze on ministers' departmental budgets is a stark admission by Mr Darling that he cannot ignore the mountain of government debt.
The Government said none of the cuts would “adversely affect” services and the savings would achieve better value for public investment, but frontline public sector workers disagreed.
John Lister from London Health Emergency said: “The decision to discharge patients from hospital should be taken by medical experts, not for financial reasons.”
Mark Wallace, taxpayers alliance campaigns director, said: “There are plenty of places in the public sector where services could be cut that would not impact on frontline delivery.”
Reader views (2)
Security-policing-health - front line services are vital as is the education of our children for their and the countries future. A cut in MP's expences and salaries would be far more appropriate and agreeable to the majority of the population.
- Ken Rogers, Wivenhoe, UK., 23/04/2009 09:51
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Why not avoid any cuts in necessary services and just save 20 billion by scrapping national ID cards instead?
Answers: too much egg on face if they do that, and they really do think that we are all criminals. Let's just hope that the Tories scrap them instead, although heaven knows how many billions will already have been spent preparing for ID cards before they get the chance.
- Nigel, London, 22/04/2009 17:32
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