IFS: ‘Sharp cuts’ likely under Labour to justice system and further education

A leading think tank is warning Labour and other major parties are “silent on the inevitability of cuts” in their spending plans, with areas from courts and prisons to further education at risk of significant cutbacks.

A new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies argues it is hard to meaningfully analyse parties’ spending commitments because they do not set out “department-by-department spending baselines”.

The IFS describes it as “essentially impossible to judge” what the funding presented in the manifestos “means for the actual funding individual public services might receive”.

This means that parties are effectively commit in their manifestos to “overall spending plans that imply sharp real-terms cuts to a range of areas, without spelling out where those cuts will fall or how they are to be achieved”, according to the widely respected think tank.

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The report names several departmental spending areas unlikely to be protected from cuts, name-checking “courts, prisons and further education” as sectors which could face “cuts of between 1.9% and 3.5% each year, according to ‘baseline’ pre-manifesto spending totals.”

The IFS has been critical of Labour’s funding commitments before, arguing upon the release of the manifesto earlier this month that it offered “no indication” of how it would raise the funds to deliver “significant change”.

The think tank has already accused Labour and the other major parties of a “conspiracy of silence on the difficulties they would face” on public finances.

Labour was approached for comment.

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