Busy times indeed for the numbercrunchers and policy wonks. I’m at what is, in effect,
the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ third post-Budget briefing of the year: one for Darling’s final Budget, one for the Emergency Budget and one, now, for the Spending Review. We’re half-way through,
but we’ve already been served a hefty chunk of meat: the IFS’s analysis of what yesterday’s Spending Review meant for public spending and for welfare.
So far, there are mixed tidings for the coalition. The IFS’s acting director Carl Emmerson – who is filling in now that Robert Chote has departed for the OBR – set the tone with his opening remarks. “By 2015,” he pointed out, “departmental spending will be lower under this government than it would have been under Labour”. He went to say that it is “laudable” that the government is trying to model the distributional effects of its policies – but that, on the evidence of only tax and benefit changes, the Spending Review is “regressive”.
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