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.
37 Responses to “Even the small cuts will have a big impact”
Liz McShane
Anon – you should have been at Progress’s Annual Conference last Saturday. David Miliband was the keynote speaker!
trevmax
david miliband is the worst idea. we need someone on the left to open a discussion about what Labour is all about. David Miliband seems to be on the Blairite wing of the party and not a lot of difference between him, Cameron and Clegg. We at least need an opposition. There has to be a mainstream party arguing for government ownership of the major sections of the economy for example. What about unilateral nuclear disarmament? what about squeezing the rich ’til their pips squeak. The labour movement isn’t only about the Blair/Brown years.
Liz McShane
Trevmax – I understand your concerns but the bottom line is we need a leader that can get Labour re-elected and take us back into Government (for all the right reasons & with progressive policies) – we don want to be in opposition for 2-3 terms so we need to think carefully about what we decide Labour stands for, how we articulate this and how it resonates with the great British public.
Anon E Mouse
Liz – I told you before I wouldn’t be deliberately offensive. Obviously I like to rant but I do that in life generally as well.
The reason for David Miliband is I see him as similar to Cameron and Clegg and the public would never vote for his brother Ed – the guy’s just too odd and being the minister for climate change is a poisoned chalice.
trevmax – I agree but his similarity will appeal to people and the country is moving rightwards like most of Europe… I also think there should be an idealogical difference between parties to give the public real choice.
This coalition does feel different – I would normally say it doesn’t matter who you vote for the government always gets in.
Liz McShane
Anon – Personally – I think Ed might have the slight edge in being viewed more ‘human’ by the wider electorate and therefore will be able to ‘connect’ with them better.
No offence taken….. I can see you like to rant at times (who doesn’t) – as they say better in than out!