Departmental budgets are set until April 2011. As the Chancellor made clear in his statement, now would not be the time for a spending review, given the uncertainties that remain in the world economy.
But as the Minister will recognise, last week the Chancellor predicted the economic growth for next year, so will he pledge to publish the comprehensive spending review results before next year’s general election?
I think that the Chancellor’s judgment on that will depend entirely on the uncertainty that we see at the time in the international economy.
Does the Minister not agree that there is a need right across the United Kingdom for certainty as we look forward into 2010 and beyond, not just for the next 12 months but for a period comparable to that covered by a CSR?
If the Chancellor had set out a spending review earlier this year, for example, it would have been pretty likely that those figures and settlements would have had to be revised, as unemployment turned out to be far lower than we initially expected. Indeed, today the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is setting out the argument for the kind of savings that could be achieved on the welfare bill if, as we hope, unemployment is much lower than it might have been over the next few years. Until that certainty is acquired, it would be wrong to set out to the last pound and the last penny what each individual Department should get. We are very clear that halving the deficit over four years is in the right time frame. Halving it any faster—over three years, for example—would involve taking £26 billion out of public spending. That would mean, for example, putting about 5p on VAT, or halving the education budget.
Since last week’s pre-Budget report we have learned that the Treasury itself does not believe that the Government’s spending plans provide a credible route to restoring our public finances, and that the Schools Secretary was still wringing concessions out of the Treasury after the Chancellor went to bed on Tuesday night. Is it not now clear that even if the Treasury Ministers recognise the scale of the fiscal crisis, they are too weak to do anything about it?
I am sure there must have been a question lurking in there somewhere. I advise the hon. Gentleman not to believe everything he reads in the newspapers. What the Chancellor did last week was set out a clear plan for how we can halve the deficit over four years. It is pretty much the fastest consolidation plan in the G7, and it is also the clearest. We stand by the judgment that four years is the right period over which to halve the deficit. Of course there are people who have advised us to take a different direction and halve the deficit over three years, which would involve some pretty difficult judgments. That is the policy advocated by the Opposition, but they have not yet said whether they would put up VAT by 5p or halve the education budget. Is that because they do not know, or because they will not say?