Chancellor George Osborne and Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws have outlined the first tranche of a cuts programme that far exceeds pre-election promises of simply cutting wasteful spending.
The emblematic “£6.2 billion” figure announced last week, about 1 per cent of government spending, is widely acknowledged to be a softening up exercise for greater austerity measures in the forthcoming Budget.
Among the early casualties were comparatively inexpensive programmes such as the Child Trust Fund, cherished by Labour as helping the working poor but loathed by Lib Dems as expensive gesture politics.
Mr Laws said that the Child Trust Fund’s fate was sealed by the fact that money was being borrowed to pay for it, thus potentially saddling future adults with debt, rather than a nest egg.
Mr Laws told MPs that Labour ministers had presided over a “scorched earth” spending policy in the months before leaving office. The coalition would now be reviewing those spending decisions with a view to reversing them where possible.
He said that amid the cuts the Government had “done something that the last Labour Government failed to do… announce from April 2011 the restoration of the earnings link on the state pension”.
The Government’s five-page long, 18 month legislative programme announced by the Queen departed from precedent in that it was as much about acts that will be scrapped as it was about any new bills.
Wholesale reform of schools, changes and cuts to the welfare system and measures to tackle Britain’s £156 billion fiscal deficit would be at the heart of the new legislative programme.
Parents and school governors will be free from local authority control to establish new schools to be known as academies.
Former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith will oversee a welfare reform bill to simplify the “confusing complexity” of the benefits system by reducing unnecessary administration of welfare as voluntary organisations and private companies are given a greater role in placing the long-term unemployed into work, to be paid by results.
The 23 bills and one draft bill contained measures to encourage Lib Dems, including a bill to hold a referendum on introducing the alternative vote electoral system for elections to Parliament by May 5 next year and to shrink the number of MPs by 10 per cent.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg will oversee his much-vaunted Freedom (Great Repeal) Bill, to restrict use of the DNA database, restrict the use of CCTV cameras and ensure that anti-terrorism legislation “strikes the right balance between protecting the public, strengthening social cohesion and protecting civil liberties” by restricting the overuse of “stop and search” powers in the Terrorism Act.
The Identity Documents Bill will cancel the ID cards programme and destroy the national identity register, while Vince Cable will oversee part-privatisation of Royal Mail.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron said he intends to press ahead with support for international sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear programme.
