The government has kept its promises on deficit reduction, ministers claimed in a progress report on policy pledges published yesterday.
Steps taken to meet the commitment to ‘significantly accelerate the reduction of the structural deficit over the course of a Parliament’ included the spending plans announced at three Budgets, as well as the 2010 Spending Review, the report said.
It added that the Office for Budget Responsibility had confirmed at last month’s Autumn Statement that the government was on course to meet its target to eradicate the deficit in the next five years.
Labour claimed the document was a ‘cover-up’ as the analysis failed to mention that Chancellor George Osborne had announced three extra years of spending cuts and abandoned the second of his fiscal targets. The aim to have debt falling as a proportion of gross domestic product by the end of the current Parliament in 2015/16, known as the supplementary target, was abandoned by Osborne in the Autumn Statement.
The deficit reduction plan is one of 399 policy pledges, made when the coalition government came to power in May 2010, that are covered in the Programme for Government update.
It includes 28 promises to reform local government, of which 26 had been met, the document said. One was the commitment to ‘promote the radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups’. This had been achieved by both the Local Government Finance Act, which will localise a proportion of business rates to councils, and the Localism Act, which gave town halls a general power of competence, the report said.
Other pledges met included reforms to the planning system and promises to explore a range of measures to bring empty homes into use.
However, the commitment to ‘rapidly abolish’ Regional Spatial Strategies had not been met, the update said. So far only one, the regional strategy for the East of England, had been revoked. The report stated: ‘It is the government’s policy to revoke the other strategies as soon as possible, subject to the outcome of the environmental assessment process that is in train.’
Plans to provide more protection against aggressive bailiffs by banning orders for sale on unsecured debts of less than £25,000 had not been enacted.
In other policy areas, the promise to ‘stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care’ is highlighted as a commitment. The report said: ‘Measures contained within the Health and Social Care Act 2012 will help deliver better health, better care and better value for money.’ It did not say whether ministers viewed the legislation as a top-down reorganisation, which would have broken the pledge.
Speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, David Cameron said the analysis was ‘full, frank and completely unvarnished’.
But Labour vice chair Michael Dugher said the document illustrated that ‘this is a government that lurches from failure to fiasco’.
He added: ‘There's no mention of his government's failure on growth, of the double-dip recession or of £212bn extra borrowing. It tries to gloss over David Cameron's broken promises on the £3bn NHS reorganisation and 7,000 fewer nurses, and doesn't even mention his tax cut worth £107,000 for 8,000 millionaires while millions of hard-working families on low and middle incomes are paying more.’
