by Emma Revell, external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies
A YouGov survey published earlier this week lays bare the scale of the task facing those of us who believe a smaller, more efficient state would deliver significant benefits to Brits, not least through lower public spending.
According to the figures, three in ten Brits say they think the current government is making bigger spending cuts than the coalition government, and a further 16 per cent see the current cuts as being on a par with the coalition era.
This is deeply concerning for a couple of reasons.
First, the scale of the cuts is in no way comparable. The coalition era included the tightest period for public spending in 60 years, and departmental spending was cut by an average of 9 per cent. According to the Institute for Government, Rachel Reeves’ first Budget means that ‘the growth in day-to-day spending between 2023/24 and 2025/26 is more generous than any recent fiscal event, and of any of Blair and Brown’s spending reviews except 2002.’
The fact that the British public today have a terrible ability to comprehend and compare changes in public spending is nothing new - take the popular narrative that recent Conservative governments somehow denied funding to the NHS when even between 2018-19 and 2022-23 the total expenditure of the NHS in England rose from £127bn to £180bn.
The term austerity was consciously and deliberately used by the coalition government to underline the seriousness of the problems the country was facing and highlight the need for the measures they were taking. In the current climate, it is being used more by the government’s critics, trying - successfully, it seems - to draw parallels between the 2010-2015 measures and today.
But in reality, neither represents actual austerity. In a cheery article from earlier this month entitled ‘What is austerity and what does it mean for my money?’, The Times defines austerity as ‘an economic term for government policy designed to control national debt’, but in 2009-10 UK government debt was £1.4 trillion. Over the coalition parliament, it rose to £1.66 trillion. Some control.
Of course, this is because the government prioritised getting the deficit down before moving on to debt, but when national newspapers don’t take the time to fully put terms into context, it's no wonder the public is confused.
And yes, Reeves has made clear that ‘unprotected’ departments will be expected to find savings, but the extent of this has yet to be made clear, and there has been no real hint it will be at the same scale as in the 2010s.
Second, this is simply another piece of evidence, along with the out-sized reaction to cuts to Winter Fuel Allowance and Liz Kendall’s recent welfare reforms, that the public as a whole simply cannot perceive any reduction in public spending as a good thing. Yes, they want their tax bills to be lower, but we as a nation are yet to have any kind of reasonable conversation about what that might entail.
Those of us who favour a smaller state have a range of different ideas of what that could look like. The problem is that the public is on board with almost none of them. Cutting the size of the civil service is popular in theory, but what else? Reining in the quangos and slashing regulation? Abolishing whole departments? How about arguing that some things should never have been the responsibility of the state in the first place?
Yes, organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies, TaxPayers' Alliance and others need to work on how to rein in the runaway growth of the state. But we also need to work out how to sell the public on why.