The Treasury and HMRC are apparently in turmoil over the attempt to impose a cut in Child Benefit for higher rate tax payers. Read this excellent piece by Iain Martin on the Wall Street Journal website. Who says “implementation” is a trivial matter?

Gordon Brown was notorious as Chancellor for announcements that looked and sounded good on the day, only to unravel as theatrics and wheezes became apparent as experts got to examine the figures. He managed to turn ‘the devil is in the detail’ from a infrequently used aphorism into an Iron Law of Budgets.

One question being constantly put to the Coalition government is what’s plan B? The Spending Review plans are massively ambitious not just in reducing public spending but also in setting out plans for most of public spending up to 2014-15. What happens if things change, or this doesn’t work?

I was fascinated by the fact that every time George Osborne mentions the Office of Budget Responsibility he prefaces it with the word “independent”, almost to the extent you could easily think it was actually called the Independent Office of Budget Responsibility.

If there is one word that sums up yesterday’s Spending Review it is insecurity. Today Britain is a much less secure place to be than it was yesterday, nationally, socially and individually. And by the time the Spending Review is implemented in full we will all be feeling much less secure – we really will […]

More on the spending review later, but first I’ve just been hunting for the independent forecasts from the OBR on the public finances and I can find… nada.

Targets are a Bad Thing (1). So says this government, at least, and they have promised to make an even bigger bonfire of targets than the one for quangos. Public Service Agreements, the pinnacle of the New Labour system that set targets for government ministries introduced in 1998, are no more. Their cousins, Departmental Strategic […]

Dramatic developments in the Spending Review: it appears that the Government is going to protect the schools budget, in real terms, and that Defence is probably only going to be cut by 10% rather than 25%. What does this mean?

Next week at 12.30 GMT Chancellor George Osborne will rise in the House of Commons to present his Comprehensive Spending Review 2010. This will set out Departmental Spending Limits (DEL) for the fiscal years 2011-12 to 2014-15, and probably a lot more besides. What should we, and should we not, be looking for in CSR […]

“Francis Maude’s much-trailed announcement of his quango cull generated plenty of large numbers: 192 quangos are to be axed and a further 118 are to be reduced to 57 by mergers. Another 171 face “substantial” reform. In total, 648 of the existing 901 bodies will remain – but almost none have been left untouched.” Nick Timmins, FT, […]