With child trust funds and university spending dominating, the full scale of the Coalition Government's cuts and exactly where they will fall remain to be seen.
Though most of the headlines have been about the scrapping of the child trust fund and the reduction in the number of university places, the full scale of the Coalition Government’s cuts and exactly where they will fall remains to be seen. Also missing from much of the headline reaction is a detailed look at the departments which will ‘only’ have to make ‘modest’ savings this year.
The department for culture, media and sport will have to find £61 million of savings, plus £27 million from the Olympic Delivery Authority – a cut of 3 per cent of the overall budget; this compares to cuts of £836m in BIS, £780m at DCLG, £683m for transport and £670m in education.
Yet it is in the smaller departments that the impact of the cuts on communities can be best seen. Taking DCMS as an example, planned spending on administration for 2010/11 is only £46 million – so the savings could never be made up by axing Whitehall ‘pen pushers’ alone.
So what does it mean in practice? Guardian Online has this afternoon worked out what it may mean to arts funding, concluding that the arts are being “singled out”: the Arts Council England (ACE) will suffer a 4% cut on top of a planned spending review, with the chair of the ACE, Dame Liz Forgan, stating the council “do not understand why we have received a higher percentage cut than other DCMS funded bodies”.
She added:
“Making cuts within the financial year is very difficult. We will now need to carefully assess what this figure of £19m means. The Arts Council has already trimmed its own budgets by £4 million in 2010/11 so this takes our total reduction this year to £23 million.
“We will do our utmost to minimise the impact on the frontline but we cannot guarantee that there will be no effect. Only £23m (5%) of our overall grant-in-aid budget goes on running costs so the vast bulk of our income goes straight to art. It would therefore be impossible to meet a cut of this size from running costs alone.”
In sport, the other primary remit of the department, the picture is little better. In addition to the £27 million reduction in the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) budget – which is responsible for developing and building the new venues and infrastructure for the Games and their use after 2012 – 3% savings will have to be found across the board, from public bodies and the department’s core budget.
An example of what this may mean on the ground can be seen in the cuts that may have to be made to Sport Unlimited, a £36 million programme established in 2009 with the aim of attracting 900,000 extra young people into sport by 2011; a 3% cut could result in 27,000 fewer young people taking up sport, to the detriment of the nation’s sporting success and health and wellbeing.
The cut to the ODA budget could have an equally negative impact. According the the latest DCMS annual report:
“Over 4,000 people are working for contractors on the Olympic Park, 9 per cent of whom were previously unemployed – Nearly one in ten workers on the Olympic Park are doing a traineeship, apprenticeship or work placement – 98 per cent of contracts have gone to UK-based businesses, of which over two-thirds are Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and just under half are based outside London.”
ODA chairman John Armitt, howeverm insists the cuts are manageable and the project remains “on track”. He said:
“This saving will be found by continuing to make efficiencies in the way the project is delivered as we have already done in the past. Our regular budget updates have consistently shown that we are on schedule and within budget with savings of around 600 million pounds already delivered to keep us on track.”
It is to be hoped he is right; an immediate 3% cut in a project which has only two years left to run, with the potential job losses and externalities, and the eyes of the world upon following the gold-spinning success of Beijing makes little sense otherwise.
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37 Responses to “Even the small cuts will have a big impact”
Anon E Mouse
Liz – I am basking in the glory of being proved right about the last Labour government and I actually think there will be a change in this country once Nick Clegg has repealed lot’s of stupid Labour laws, ID cards and the like.
I also like the fact that (unlike Brown who abolished the 10p tax and punished the poor directly) Clegg is trying to help the poor with the tax allowances.
I hate to say it but I’m beginning to like Clegg (still don’t like Cameron though!) and if this coalition succeeds and Labour members are stupid enough to vote for Ed Balls or Ed Miliband then as a party there will be no point of Labour anymore.
And the reasons for the cost cutting is Labour’s debts…
Shamik – The exclamation marks at the end indicate light hearted irony…
Liz McShane
Anon – please indulge me – apart from from the 2 Eds, who would you vote/prefer as next Labour leader, it sounds like you are still interested in the future of the party or maybe that’s just a mad thought….
Mr S – 110% in agreement.
Anon E Mouse
Liz – David Miliband ARRRRGHHHHHH I said it.
I’ve changed my opinion of him completely after seeing him during the election on the Politics Show – he was good natured and light hearted and funny. When I remember how badly Wheelan and the other Brown thugs treated him I think he’s the man.
He could make Labour electable and even though they’ve lost my vote we do need an opposition in this country rather than the press…
(I like Diane Abbott as well but she has no chance I feel)
Liz McShane
Anon,
Firstly apologies: I meant to write: “Lighten up..? I wish I could” (rather than U lighten up… etc)
Thanks for being so candid – so you really are torn between Old Labour & New Labour – that explains a lot, now I ‘get you’…!!
manishta sunnia
Even small cuts will have a big impact @NishmaDoshi #noshock #nocuts http://bit.ly/9Emmmw