ruthcurtice.bsky.social
Chief Executive, Resolution Foundation
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The government's answer is it will be funded by DWP efficiency savings. The convenience of efficiency matching employment support does not suggest this is a true assessment of what's needed. The announced £1bn employment support is nothing more than a pencil on a spreadsheet in 2029.
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This chart shows the health picture. Real increase in RDEL through this spending review is £19bn. Health and social care takes £17bn of it.
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Important note though - the government has increased financial transactions which are included in the CDEL total. That increase looks like it is partly used to fund the warm homes plan. So some of the £13.2bn manifesto commitment is met with loans, not cash. (loans excluded from fiscal rules)
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Whereas the police spending power number in the speech is over the whole Parliament (2.3%). It's 1.7% over the next three years.
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Looks like big picture, NHS and defence grow, foreign aid falls, some modest growth in education per pupil, leaving everyone else roughly flat real per person for the next three years. But having had the speech, now we will dig into the real numbers....
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3% increase in the NHS. £29bn in cash terms by the end. That sounds broadly as expected. But confirms NHS as basically the big winners from this spending review, along with defence.
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CASH uplift in core schools spending of over £4bn. Watch this space for what that means in real terms which is obviously what matters. But it will be growth per pupil as pupil numbers falling.
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Confirmation of the very welcome additional funding for free school meals, with all families on universal credit eligible.
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Some (quite typical) promise of efficiency savings: closing government offices, reducing consultancy spend.
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Warm homes plan in line with manifesto, CX says. That implies a size of £13.2bn.
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Police spending: 2.3% per year "over the spending review period". Watch out for the time periods today. Suspect the Treasury is lumping phase 1 and 2 of the spending review together - so including 24-25 and 25-26 spending increases.
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One for the nerds: green book review makes it into the speech!
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A series of transport announcements, but hard to get a sense of what's happening to transport spending overall just from the speech.
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It leaves the rate of funding for social homes higher than any point since 2010, but slightly below the last Labour government's National Affordable Homes Programme (in real terms).
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"Biggest cash injection into social and affordable housing". This is the £39bn trailed this morning. The Chancellor's caveat of "especially for social rent" is good news - look forward to seeing the detail. NB £39bn is a total number over ten years.
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Welcome increase in the scale of the British business bank - to £25.6bn.
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Chancellor announces some new energy projects, and says she is giving Great British energy some money. But looks like we have to wait for the document for some numbers!
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Home office: saving of £1bn from a promise to no longer house asylum seekers in hotels.
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Defence spending rising to 2.6%. This is the same as expected - the difference with 2.5% is the inclusion of intelligence agencies.
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Chancellor confirms that spending review is delivered within the same envelope ie no new money today. As expected, given we don’t have an OBR forecast. But actually pretty unusual in the history of spending reviews!
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Priorities for this spending review: defence, health growth. As expected.
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News this morning dominated by money for affordable housing. The TOTAL funding of £39bn over ten years is being completed to the EXTRA capital investment by this government over five years. I'm reserving judgement on whether housing is a winner until we see more detail.
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Will also be interesting to see whether government announces any explicit cuts/programmes to be stopped having been through the books with a fine tooth comb.
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This chart shows the implications for example if health settles at the rumoured 2.8%
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On day to day spending watch for: size of health which decides everything else; education where falling pupil numbers might mean debates about how to view the numbers; whether defence gets any higher than 2.5%; and whether real terms cuts fall on others.
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I was just wondering this exact thing! To show they had paid for it they would have to settle departments lower to make up the difference - but that could be an option.
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If there was wouldn't they have done that last year.....?
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Housing benefit and disability benefits
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Interested in views on whether it's political viable to not flesh out this policy until the next fiscal event in the autumn - which seemed to be the implication of what the PM said (and is consistent with previous sensible commitments to keep fiscal policy for fiscal events).
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Dealing with hard cases is a sensible move. Spending big money on winter fuel while saying concessions on disability benefits and the two child limit are unaffordable would be the wrong choice for a government focused on living standards for all. Pensioner poverty has fallen and is set to fall.
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Simply increasing the threshold isn't easy because of the connection to pension credit. If the threshold for pension credit is lifted it would quickly cost more than the original savings from cutting winter fuel. Using a random other threshold would mean designing some new eligibility test/process.
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4. Good question from Baroness Ruth Lister about whether PIP cuts risk negative employment effects because the money is used to enable work. Our report today found that a best case employment effect would be a boost of 105,000 this Parliament.