CHANCELLOR Osborne’s vicious £11.5 billion Spending Review attacks on pay, public services and benefits, were immediately condemned by trade union and TUC leaders representing millions of workers on Wednesday.
The University and College Union (UCU) said the chancellor’s decision to open his speech by lamenting the policy of loading debts onto future generations was an unfortunate comparison considering the government’s education policies.
UCU President, Simon Renton, said: ‘The chancellor began his speech by saying the greatest unfairness would be loading debts on our children because we were not prepared to tackle the causes.
‘Unfortunately, loading debts on our children is exactly what the government’s policies for further and higher education are doing.
‘The coalition has forced fees of as much as £9,000 a year on university students and young adults wanting to study at college who must now take out loans to fund their courses.’
Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: ‘As well as the cuts to school and college funding, young people have seen tuition fees treble, the Education Maintenance Allowance cut, youth unemployment hovering around a million and cuts to a range of essential services.
‘The Government’s plan for a national school funding formula and redistribution of already limited resources will simply shift funding problems around the school system. Its attacks on local authorities will deny schools access to essential services.
‘The Chancellor’s announcement of an acceleration in the free schools programme follows the huge waste of public money on the academies programme.
‘Instead of wasting more money on free schools, we need properly targeted and planned capital spending to respond to the huge increase in school places we need as the pupil population increases.
‘The Chancellor again singled out public sector workers, including teachers, with confirmation of the Government’s pay cap and attacks on pay progression.
‘Already under this Government, teachers have seen their pay cut in real and take-home terms.
‘The Government now plans to break up the national teacher pay structure and to increase teachers’ workload.’
Len McCluskey general secretary of Unite, said: ‘George Osborne’s comprehensive spending review offers no hope and no growth and will cast the UK into economic gloom for the next decade.
‘With over 80 per cent of the cuts yet to come, it is clear that there will be no let-up in the misery that the coalition is inflicting on ordinary families trying to make ends meet.
‘Don’t expect this chancellor to create jobs for our kids, to support families struggling with soaring energy bills or ease off on the destruction of our NHS.
‘Instead, we face a future of economic misery where the chill winds of self-defeating austerity continue to howl through town halls and communities up and down the country.
‘Services that people rely on are already at breaking point and local authorities will be pushed to the brink of going bust thanks to this further round of cuts.
‘With our economy on life support, our nation desperately needs spades in the ground to get Britain building.
‘We need spending to boost jobs and growth now, not in five or ten years time and an end to the economic misery this chancellor is causing.’
Brian Strutton, GMB National Secretary for Public Services, said: ‘I predict another 70,000 local council jobs will go in these cuts on top of the 420,000 that have already gone.
‘This will take the total number of jobs lost in local government to nearly half a million since the election in 2010.
‘This is more than half of the entire public sector job losses. This has coincided with a three-year pay freeze. It really has been a dire time for local government under the coalition.
‘Council services have already been decimated as a result of 26% cuts to local authority budgets and the freeze on council tax.
‘This further reduction will mean the average council having to find another £30m in savings at a time when local communities need more support than ever.
‘Councils are coping by cutting services but they should really be saying “enough is enough”.
‘Transferring money from other budgets to local councils is a “smoke and mirrors” exercise and does not change these cuts which are down 10% on a like-for-like basis.
‘Things like the £10bn backlog of pothole repairs blighting our roads and the £20bn funding gap for care for the elderly. This means the elderly are left to struggle isolated at home with fewer services or put in chronically underfunded care homes.
‘These are the legacy of council cuts and there are many more examples.
‘The Chancellor’s sideswipe at public sector workers by questioning their pay progression also reveals a lack of understanding about pay systems.
‘People begin at a starter rate of pay and through experience progress to the rate for the job, typically after five years. If anything, public sector workers are actually underpaid for too long and should accelerate much more quickly to the rate for the job.
‘Furthermore, performance related pay systems have been widely shown not to work.
‘This is just another unpleasant dig at public sector workers who have already been made scapegoats for problems they had nothing to do with.’
Dr Mark Porter, Chair of the BMA Council, said: ‘Although the NHS budget in England has been protected this does not allow for keeping pace with new treatments, an ageing population and rising demand.
‘All too often, short-term cuts are being made to meet soaring financial pressures often without the involvement of clinicians.
‘Only by putting resources in the right place and working with doctors can the Government strive to meet the challenges the NHS faces.
‘We support the Government’s commitment to the care of older people and we hope that the allocated funding is indeed used to genuinely meet the needs of patients and help alleviate the current pressures on emergency departments.
‘However, we are concerned that the Chancellor’s decision to cut the local government budget by 10 per cent will seriously undermine the Government’s commitment to vulnerable people because of the impact on social care, and wider public health needs.’
Dave Prentis, General Secretary of Unison said: ‘Today’s spending review reveals the true extent of the Government’s failure.
‘The Chancellor has got it horribly wrong – despite all the promises, the austerity measures and cuts, he still hasn’t got the country out of recession.
‘We are still in the slowest economic recovery in 100 years and yet all we get from this Chancellor is more of the same.
‘The Government is losing grip on economic reality if they continue travelling down the same path, expecting to arrive at a different destination.
‘They need a plan B and they need it now.
‘The idea that the NHS is being ring-fenced would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.
‘We’ve all paid into the NHS and we expect it to be there to deliver when we need it.
‘How can anyone believe the Chancellor on unemployment because the figures do not add up.
‘Despite the best efforts of the private sector any jobs being created are part-time, low wage and do not replace the hundreds and thousands of public sector jobs that have been lost.
‘There are 2.5m people out of work, 1m are young and that is a shocking statistic.
‘Instead of more cuts and austerity what the country desperately needs is an economic boost to stimulate jobs, growth and spending.’
PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: ‘Osborne has been disastrous for our communities, with half a million of our friends and neighbours now relying on food banks to get by.
‘Despite all the evidence that austerity is making things worse not better, Osborne is slashing billions more from government departments, including cutting the living standards of hard-working public servants for many years to come.
‘By ploughing ahead with more cuts, instead of investment to help our economy to grow, Osborne has proved he is a failed chancellor who is putting politics before the needs of the country.’
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘This is a toxic mix of bad economics, nasty politics and dishonest presentation.
‘The last thing our struggling economy needs is further cuts to spending to try to close a deficit made worse by the Chancellor’s earlier cuts.
‘When the medicine is not working and side effects are choking the patient you need a change in treatment not more of the same. Many services will be hard hit.
‘Worst of all is a new attack on some of the most vulnerable in our society through the seven-day wait and other conditions for social security payments.
‘The Chancellor may think attacks on welfare go down well with voters, but these will lead to parents not having enough cash to feed their children.
‘And for all the talk of new investment, the truth is that the overall capital spend in 2015 will be exactly the same as the Chancellor forecast in his Budget earlier this year.’
