WARRINGTON South MP Faisal Rasid has attacked the Government’s Spending Review announced this week slamming it as a pre-election “gimmick.”
On Wednesday (Sept 4) the Government announced its fast tracked one-year Spending Review which will allocate money to departments for the financial year starting April 2020.
Faisal says the short timeframe means that there will be little time for consultation and proper consideration of the Treasury’s plans by the Office of Budget Responsibility.
The Spending Review will be published before the Budget, meaning Chancellor Javid will be setting spending plans without access to updated economic projections from the OBR and before setting his tax policies.
The Chancellor set out plans for government spending covering the first year outside the EU, with an extra £13.4bn in public spending for 2020-21. Once capital spending is included, the increase amounts to a rise of 4.1% over this year.
Faisal saidsaid:“The Government’s approach is going against the thrust of official Treasury advice. As pointed out by the IFS, doing the Spending Review in advance of Brexit being completed makes little sense without having reliable economic and fiscal forecasts, and these will be hard to produce before Brexit.
“The reality is that this Spending Review is a pre-election gimmick. Public services have been ruthlessly cut by the Conservatives for nearly ten years. These announcements come nowhere near repairing the damage done since 2010, worth over £40bn of spending cuts.
“The British public will see this cynical stunt for what it is: a bunch of empty promises that the Prime Minister may as well have written on the side of a bus.
“These stunt measures not only fail to address people’s priorities, they demonstrate that the Tories have no appreciation of the pain imposed on them by year after year of Tory austerity and cuts.
“At least £1 billion of the promised additional £1.8 billion for the NHS was not new money. It’s also been revealed that a huge proportion of the promised 20,000 additional police officers won’t be on the frontline.
“Javid has announced a further £2bn in new Brexit funding for government departments as his Government continues to plunge the country into crisis and threaten an economically catastrophic No Deal Brexit.”
“We’ve won the argument on ending austerity, but only Labour can be trusted to deliver it. Only Labour cares about public services and the people who rely on them.”
