On this morning’s Today programme Education minister Michael Gove – reputedly a man of great intelligence – maintained that raising University tuition fees to nearly 3 times their current level for some Universities would have absolutely no effect on levels of applications from students from lower and middle income backgrounds.

After the post about the front loading of local government cuts I received this message from Carl Emmerson, the acting Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS):

A colleague in local government tells me that I missed the front-loading of the local government cuts in SR2010.

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 […]