George osborne

Tuesday

Gabriel Milland

The cuts start to bite

It must have been the toughest press release that anyone in the Central Office of Infomation has ever had to draft. A freeze on new campaigns and the abandonment of any regarded as “non-essential” mean staff numbers will drop by 40 percent – a loss of 287 jobs. Compulsory redundancies loom. The same press notice also revealed that the COI’s advertising spend was down by a 52% last month compared to June last year. We are not talking about small sums here. Last year’s COI marketing  spend of an eye-watering £531 million – half of it going on advertising – was about 20 percent more than the next biggest spender,

Peter Hoskin

Why the government needn’t fear the strikes

With the threat of major strikes timed to coincide with Osborne’s spending review in October, I think it’s worth exhuming an important point that Julian Glover made in his Guardian column last month: “UK politics is often characterised as a contest for the centre ground, but that misdescribes the nature of the quest. Centrism implies banality, but I don’t think voters want their governments to be mundane. There is a willingness to endorse radical action if it is explained and if it looks practicable. It worked for the left under Attlee and Blair; it worked for the right under Thatcher; and it is working – so far – for this

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Tyrie asserts himself once again

Few MPs have made quite so many waves recenty as last year’s Spectator backbencher of the year, Andrew Tyrie. Under his chairmanship, the Treasury Select Committee seems to have gained a new vitality and edge. And it has certainly accumulated more powers, with the ability to veto the government’s appointments to, and dismissals from, the Office for Budget Responsibility. As he put it himself in an interview with the Independent last week, “The fight back by Parliament is beginning now.” Just how aggressively he intends to prosecute that fight back is suggested by his comments in the Times (£) today. Responding to George Osborne’s recent demands for the banks to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

There is no Cabinet rift on benefit reform

Here’s me about to go on holiday, and the welfare wars seem to be opening up. Neil O’Brien has a piece on it over at the Telegraph website. And Hopi Sen, one of the better leftie bloggers, has written a response to my post yesterday. Partly, he wants to stir: it’s not so much that the Treasury want to block IDS’s reforms, he says, but rather that they are following Osborne’s orders to reduce the deficit. And so it’s one part of the government at war with another. By contrast, the Whitehall wars I outlined are hangovers from the Brown days, where the Treasury set policy for all other departments

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Getting credit flowing will be one of the coalition’s toughest challenges

In interview with the Sunday Telegraph today, George Osborne stresses that the banks have got to start lending again – and he’s right to do so. The easy availability of cheap credit may have done much to get us into this mess, but now we face a converse problem. As a recent Bank of England report shows, net lending from the banks to businesses remains negative – or, in other words, more is being paid back than given out – and the situation is getting worse. With small and medium businesses so reliant on credit to get themselves off the ground, this doesn’t augur well for a powerful recovery. But

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Will Cable be selling the coalition’s cuts?

Compared to the major affairs of state, David Cameron’s decision to spend part of this summer touring the nation to sell the coalition and its spending cuts may seem but a trifle. Yet it’s a good move nonetheless. After the obfuscations from all sides before the election, Osborne’s Budget swept in a more upfront approach to cuts. Cameron’s roadshow, you hope, will keep that going. One thing to look out for is how Vince Cable gets on this summer. The Telegraph reports that he will also be involved in the coalition’s big promotional drive, and will be holding his own public meetings during August. A recipe for trouble given Cable’s

Friday

Peter Hoskin

At last, IDS gets his chance to reform benefits

For some time now, we on Coffee House have been raving about Iain Duncan Smith’s plans for reforming benefits. And, today, it finally looks as though they – or something like them – will soon be put into action. The DWP is releasing a consultation document which aims to simplify and straighten out a benefits system which now acts as a barrier to work. Over the next few months, various think-tanks and other organisations will submit their own ideas for doing just that. Someone who will no doubt take part in that process, Policy Exchange’s Neil O’Brien, has a written a very useful summary of the main questions and arguments

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Will GDP rise be Osborne’s get out clause?

Alistair Darling has been on Sky News doing a lap of honour for today’s GDP growth figures. “Vindicates everything we did,” he said – his narrative being that the extra debt did indeed boost the economy and produced 1.1 percent growth in this quarter. This chimes with what I wrote in the Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago: that the economy is better, not worse, than the Tories thought. Even if, or should I say when, the ONS say the figure was wrong and needs to be revised downwards it will still mean tax revenue churning in at a far faster rate than thought. This will give Osborne a get-out

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Osborne keeps it simple

George Osborne has talked of simplifying the tax system for years, and today he launched the OTS, The Office for Tax Simplification. The OTS will be chaired by Michael Jack, s Treasury minister in the Major government, and John Whiting of PWC and Chartered Institute of Taxation. The OTS looks suspiciously like a quango, but some public bodies are necessary and welcome. The tax system is unintelligible, and, needless to say, Gordon Brown complicated it further with morass of stealth taxes, tax credits and new loopholes opened more by chance than design. This has particularly affected small businesses and the OTS will identify salient businesses taxes and recommend their simplification.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Clueless Chuka

Given that the Labour leadership campaign is so dull, we should thank Chuka Umunna for cheering us up with his comedy economic analysis. Now on the Treasury Select Committee, he has regaled us with an ‘Open letter to George Osborne’ where he makes many entertaining points. It’s worth looking at, because it sums up a few errors swirling around the Labour benches.   1)   During our exchange, you insisted your budget was “progressive”… you stood by your decision to apply a 10 percent cut to the housing benefit of those who have been on JSA for more than 12 months. Osborne has to use words like “progressive” to assuage the

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

A solid performance from Osborne

If only PMQs were more like select committee sessions. Sure, the latter aren’t completely free from tribalism, even if it takes a subtler hue – but they are still considerably more insightful than Wednesday’s pantomime in the chamber. Frequently, they play like a demonstration of how democracy can, and should, work. Such was the case with George Osborne’s appearance before the Treasury Select Committee this morning.  The questions, particularly those on whether the Budget hits the poorest hardest, were generally measured and insistent.  But Osborne stood up well through it all, pointing out how any party in power would have to implement hefty spending cuts and tax rises.  And he

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Are the OBR’s growth forecasts too optimistic?

Much ado about the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth predictions in the Treasury Select Committee earlier, especially as an OBR official admitted that the cuts and tax hikes in the Budget could conceivably tip us into a double-dip recession. So are the OBR’s official forecasts too optimistic, as some are now claiming? Only time will tell, but we can get a decent sense of things by comparing them with the independent forecasts that the Treasury collect here. And this is the result: In other words, the OBR growth forecasts stick pretty closely to the average independent forecast, although they are a touch more optimistic. Admittedly, these independent forecasts were collected

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Osborne to strengthen Parliament’s role in OBR appointments?

It may not be the sexiest story in today’s newspapers, but the ongoing Office for Budget Responsibility row is certainly among the most important.  After all, a great deal rests on how it is resolved.  Not only could we end up without a body capable of restoring trust in fiscal forecasts, but the government’s promising transparency agenda could be sunk before it has even had chance to sail.  Much will depend on how far George Osborne goes to reinvigorate the OBR’s independent credentials. In which case, it’s worth highlighting the Sunday Telegraph’s summary of Sir Alan Budd’s proposals to do just that.  The departing OBR chief is expected to outline

Saturday

David Blackburn

Send for Chote

And so it continues. The FT reports that Sir Alan Budd has denied that George Osborne cooked the OBR’s job loss forecasts. ‘It was genuinely a forecasting correction with no ministerial interference,’ he said, blandly. The correction was the result of the OBR’s use of a narrow definition of public sector workforce than is employed by other statisticians. That is not abnormal: statisticians are a law unto themselves. But, as the saying goes, it doesn’t look good. The OBR’s figures supported the government and the story is beginning to emit of a whiff of mendacity. Once more, George Osborne is in a mess of his own making. His political instincts veer

Friday

Peter Hoskin

A question of independence

And so this morning’s Office for Budget Responsibility story rumbles on, with various Labour figures questions whether the organisation is as independent as it should be.  The most significant intervention, though, is from the government.  As the FT reports, George Osborne’s Treasury team is hanging onto its ability to select the next head of the OBR. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the next OBR chief will be a placeman, sympathetic and mouldable to the Tories’ wishes.  In fact, my guess is that Osborne will go out of his way to find an uncontroversial, neutral replacement for Sir Alan Budd.  But with a PoliticsHome poll showing that only 16

Peter Hoskin

Osborne must make the workings of the OBR even more transparent

Forget the hubbub about Gove’s schools list, the most damaging story for the government this week could well be on the cover of today’s FT.  Alex Barker does a great job of summarising it here. But the central point is that the Office for Budget Responsibility changed its forecasting methods just before the Budget, with the effect of reducing how many public sector jobs would be lost due to the government’s measures. This isn’t damning on its own: statisticians constantly tweak their forecasting methods. But when you consider that the OBR’s new methods incorporated policies which haven’t even been announced yet (including one which pre-empts the findings of John Hutton’s

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The briefest of stints

Well, that was quick: after only three months in the role, Alan Budd is to step down as the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility.  A shame, too.  In a quiet sort of way, he had become one of the defining figures in these early days of coalition government – helping to establish the OBR as one of the most significant actors on the political landscape.  It is certainly, now, a more effective body than I previously thought it would be. Although Budd’s contract was for three months, there was some idle Westminster speculation that he’d stick around – so the rumour mill is puffing away at his departure

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

The Treasury is playing a very smart game

Picking up David Laws’ axe at the Treasury was never going to be easy – but all credit to Danny Alexander, who seems to be managing it with some degree of gusto.  After those extra savings he announced a few weeks ago, the Chief Sec has now written to ministers asking them to identify cuts of up to 40 percent in their budgets.  I repeat: 40 percent.  That’s higher than the highest roundabout figure I heard before the election (30 percent, from civil servants as it happens).  And it tops the 33 percent that the IFS suggested might be necessary last week.  Quite a few ministers will be quaking at

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The plan’s afoot

In the midst of this ongoing row about employment numbers, it is worth noting that the OBR figures released today show that there’ll be 610 thousand fewer public sector jobs at the end of parliament than there are now. But the overall number of jobs in the economy will increase by 1.34 million. This means there’ll be 1.95 million more private sector workers at the time of the next election. As I wrote in the magazine last week, one of the aims of the Budget was to shift employment from the public sector to the private sector. The OBR’s numbers show that the Budget should do this. There are, at

Peter Hoskin

About those job losses…

Much ado about the Guardian’s scoop this evening: a leaked Treasury document which forecasts that up to 1.3 million jobs could be lost as a result of the spending cuts in the Budget.  Or, to put it in the words of the document itself: “100-120,000 public sector jobs and 120-140,000 private sector jobs assumed to be lost per annum for five years through cuts.” You can expect Labour to get stuck into these numbers, and the fact that they were previously hidden from public view, with no uncertain relish.  Ed Balls has already described them as “chilling”.  But it’s worth making a couple of points, by way of context: i)