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”
trevmax
@liz
i thought labour stood for government ownership of the major sections of the economy, unilateral nuclear disarmament, squeezing the rich ’til their pips squeak’. they always did. i thought the last 13 years was an aberration which was about getting into power. i mean there’s no point being elected if you have to throw all your principles away to do it. if you support david miliband, why not just join the lib dems and be in government now?
trevmax
@ liz and anon
so what does the labour party either stand or want to stand for? Blair/Milliband was liberalism wasn’t it? free markets? not free markets? fact is i don’t know. when i used to vote labour back before 1997 at least i thought i knew, now i don’t have a clue. the fact is labour (like the other parties) is a broad church and that includes some of the old Bennite left and the Blairite right, but you have to pick a direction and I don’t think Blairite right would really give the current coalition an opposition.
can you think of a policy that would even make labour stand out from the coalition apart from ‘massive cuts but wait a while’
Liz McShane
TrevMaxx – I don’t think I actually said that I support David Miliband…. I don’t think there’s much point or fun being in opposition. Do you not think that the Labour Government introduced any progressive policies in the last 13 years?.. what about The Minimum Wage, Family Tax Credits etc..
I agree they could/should have done more & been bolder and not done some of the things that they did (10p tax rate, Iraq etc).
While Nuclear Disarmament may be important & valid to some it doesn’t get that many votes on the doorstep. I think we need to be pragmatic as well as progressive & bold.
trevmax
liz, you seem only to be interested in power rather than principles. i never voted for labour from Blair onwards because it was fundamentally dishonest. the removal of clause 4 was about power not because that was believed to be the right thing. i could vote for old labour but not new. that’s why there needs to be a debate and i don’t see one. your argument seems to be about what gets votes or gets labour back into power.
what do you mean when you say they should have been bolder? what do you actually think about nuclear disarmament? i don’t doubt labour did some good but it’s rather counterbalanced by being in the fiscal situation we’re in. like a bank robber giving money to charity.
trevmax
and it was not just Iraq that was a mistake. we had 10 years of constant warmongering. i thought the Cons were supposed to be Imperialist like that but what did we have?, a small, short, defensive war over the falklands and a multilateral war to eject Saddam from Kuwait. The records couldn’t be more different.
as for work and welfare, we have 5.5 million watching Jeremy Kyle. unchanged from 1997. wtf was that all about?
difference between rich and poor never greater. banks lauded for their wonderful contribution to the ‘bubble’.
i’d like a discussion about the achievements and minimum wage was one. tax credits wasn’t because it was borrowed off future generations.