Who is prepared to cut, and who isn’t?

One of the leitmotifs of this Parliament  – and something which, by many inside accounts, is helping the coalition immensely – is the willingness of the civil service to wield the axe within their own departments.  And now, courtesy of Reform and the Institute of Chartered Accountants, a new survey suggests that this mentality may stretch beyond Whitehall.  It quizzes public sector “finance decision makers,” and the headline finding is that:

“82 per cent of respondents think further savings can be made within their organisation in the next year without affecting the current level of service they provide.”

Far more intriguing, though, is the finding that 84 percent of them fear that “interference from government” will prevent them from implementing these cuts in full.  Of course, public sector types will always complain about dictates from central government.  But, in this case, their concern does speak to a problem that George Osborne may end up facing: that his Cabinet colleagues, afraid of their constituents’ wrath, are more reluctant to cut than the unelected figures who will be tasked with putting those cuts in place.