How big are the cuts so far?

‘Osborne’s austerity is killing the recovery.’ It’s a familiar refrain, one that we hear every time there’s bad economic news. And, sure enough, today’s terrible GDP stats have sparked yet another rendition. Take this, for example, from the TUC’s Brendan Barber: ‘The government’s austerity strategy is failing so spectacularly that is has wiped out the recovery completely.’ But very rarely is that austerity quantified. Just how big are these cuts that have supposedly crippled the British economy?

Well, according to the latest ONS figures, total managed expenditure stayed roughly flat in the coalition’s first year, before being cut by just 1.8 per cent in real terms (£12.6 billion) in 2011-12. But this hides the true extent of the cuts to public services, as it includes the ever-rising benefits bill and our debt interest payments. Stripping these out leaves what the IFS calls ‘public service spending’ — which fell by 3.3 per cent in 2010-11 and a further 4.3