Osborne called to spell out welfare cuts
19/03/2015
The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said that Chancellor George Osborne needs to spell out how he plans to cut £12 billion from welfare spending.
In response to the budget, the independent forecaster has claimed Mr Osborne must make public exactly how he plans to cut such a large amount of money from welfare spending, as only £2 billion of the proposed cuts have been outlined so far. All the cuts are supposed to be in place by 2017-2018.
Director of IFS Paul Johnson has said the cuts would amount to twice the size of any cuts made by this parliament, but the IFS has been “left guessing” how these cuts will be made. He also talked about how the UKs recovery has not been felt equally by everyone in the UK, and even households that have regained their pre-recession levels have experienced the “slowest recovery in modern history”. The IFS concluded that even though the richest people in the UK have been effected by the governments tax changes, benefit cuts had "hit low income working age people" hard.
Paul Johnson continued:
"You're going to have to do things like further big cuts in child benefit, or really substantial cuts to housing benefit or significant cuts to disability benefits.
"He's announced about £2bn [of cuts] and we know nothing about where the further £10bn are coming from."
"Average incomes among pensioners have risen, among those of working age they have fallen, with especially big falls for those in their 20s.
"We are for sure much worse off on average than we could reasonably have expected to be back in 2007 or indeed back in 2010.”
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