Why Next Week’s Budget Is Unlikely To Be All Doom and Gloom
Civitas, 14 April 2009
In just over a week’s time, Alistair Darling announces his budget. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates there is currently a £39 billion hole in public finances fixable only by massive tax rises or equally big public-spending cuts. Since the Government faces a general election in the next year or so, it can safely be anticipated that neither measure will be announced next week.
Clearly, however, the Chancellor has little room for manoeuvre, and since a general election need not be held until June 2010, next week’s budget is unlikely to contain much by way of tax cuts or other sweeteners with which to soften up the electorate. For that, they will have to wait until the 2010 budget.
However, next week’s budget is unlikely to be all doom and gloom.
One thing of which one can be fairly certain it will contain is an announcement that the Treasury will cover the current estimated gap of between £100–£200 million in the education budget for 16-18 year olds.
That such a gap should ever have arisen in the first place is nothing short of a public scandal, responsibility for which appears to fall squarely with the DCSF and the minister supposedly in charge of it, the Children’s Secretary Ed Balls.Yet his department blithely continues to refuse to take any responsibility for the fiasco. Instead, the School’s Minister Jim Knight has placed the blame for it squarely on the shoulders of the soon-to-be-wound-up LSC whose head conveniently has just resigned over another financial screw-up in which his QUANGO was involved.
Heads of schools and sixth form college are threatening to take to court the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) for reneging on its previous commitments to them to underwrite increased provision of places this coming September. And the Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee for Education is threatening to haul the Children’s Secretary before it to explain the imbroglio.
Neither thing is likely to come to pass of course. For next week’s budget will almost certainly contain announcement of the Treasury’s intention to underwrite all commitments into which schools and sixth form colleges have entered with applicants for this coming September.
What, in fact, should be a matter of deep embarrassment for the DCSF and its senior ministers, therefore, is likely to be passed off as good news and a cause for celebration.
‘Just look at how caring and responsible a Government this is’ is likely to be the sound-bite of the day, and ‘Not one single 16-18 year old who wants a full-time place in further education next year will be denied one’ the triumphant head-line of the DCSF’s press releases.
What makes me so confident of all this? One simple thing and one alone. Both Jim Knight and Ed Balls have strongly intimated that eventually the necessary funds will be found to obviate the need for any cuts in the places already offered to 16-18 year olds this coming September.
Therefore, the funds will almost certainly be found next week and what, in fact, was clear incompetence on the part of the DCSF for having seriously misled the LSC about how much would be forthcoming for 16-18 year old education this September will be passed off by the DCSF and the Children’s Minister as yet another triumph for him and his department.
It is all a sorry state of affairs.
Clearly something went very badly wrong at the DCSF.
It claimed that it was not until too late that it knew of what the LSC had been proposing to and eventually did tell the heads of schools and sixth form colleges about how much extra would be available to them in September for 16-18 year old education, given a sharp rise in applications they received.Yet, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, ‘the LSC said Mr Ball’s department was kept aware of what [it]… had been doing throughout’ and that ‘the DCSF was “involved throughout and [had] approved”’ what it initially told school and college heads.
Quite what went wrong at the DSCSF is unclear. However, when senior figures there woke up to the fact that the LSC had told heads of schools and sixth form colleges that more would be allocated to make possible the increase in places it had encouraged them to offer, the DCSF then forced it send a second letter informing them that the extra money that it had said would be available would not be. The DCSF then seemingly tried to bury news of the forced retraction by making it public on the same day as President Obama arrived in London for the G20 summit. When things then started to go pear-shaped for the DCSF, it seems that serious horse-trading must have begun between the Children’s Secretary and the Chancellor, for that was when the ministerial intimations were given that everything would be alright on the night.
The present Children’s Secretary has previous form for such devious news management, as do his predecessors at that department and other New Labour apparachiks.
Just over a year ago, Ed Balls chose to make a rumpus about the admissions policies of faith schools, which proved entirely spurious, on the same day as that on which it was announced that 100,000 primary schoolchildren had been denied their first choice of secondary school.
Eighteen months or so before that, it was revealed that aides to Balls’ predecessor at the then DfES Alan Johnson had ordered officials to bring forward the announcement of improved national GCSE results that year against normal practice, so that it should coincide with the announcement of an unpromising set of results for that year in SATs tests at key stages 1 and 2.
Earlier still, of course, there was the notorious case of the one time special adviser to Stephen Byers, then Secretary of State for the Department of Transport, Local Government and Regions, who in that capacity had sent the department’s Director of Communications an email on September 11th 2001 advising him it would be a good day on which to announce some news about the pension rights of local counsellors likely to be of embarrassment to the Labour Party.
That same special adviser lost her job at that Department some months later, when it was revealed that, again in that same capacity, she had sent a second email to a subsequent Director of Communications of that department advising him that the day of Princess Margaret’s funeral would be a good one on which to announce some news embarrassing to the department.
La dee da!
But don’t let this reminder about Labour’s spin-doctoring get you down. As I say, we should all look forward to being told next week to rejoice at Labour’s far-sightedness and good fiscal management, when Alistair pulls his 6th form place-saving rabbit out of his Chancellor’s hat.
You couldn’t make it all up could you? Or could you? Labour’s spin doctors all seem to be making a pretty damned good job of doing just that.