TUC challenge to Osborne's 'collective effort' on cuts

The TUC has challenged the view that public spending cuts are being made "fairly", as claimed yesterday by the chancellor, George Osborne. The organisation claims today that some of the UK's poorest families have been hit by what it describes as unfair spending cuts during the first 100 days of the coalition government. Its analysis of departmental spending highlights a number of areas where cuts have affected the UK's poorest citizens. They include: • Free school meals - The cancelled measure would have extended entitlement to free school meals to about 500,000 families in work on low pay from September this year. Cost £125m. • Every child a reader - This programme to provide early support to children with literacy difficulties (focussed on inner-city schools) will be cut by at least £5m and its future is not guaranteed. • City Challenge Fund - This programme aimed to provide extra support to under-performing children in the most deprived areas, but has been cut by £8m this year. • Building Schools for the Future - This scrapped programme was the biggest-ever school buildings investment plan. The aim was to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary school in England. Cost £7.5bn. • Housing benefit - Nearly a million (936,960) households will lose around £624 a year as a result of changes to housing benefit. Londoners will be worst hit. • Homes and Communities Agency - Cuts to programmes including Kickstart (for restarting stalled house building programmes), affordable housing, gypsy and traveller support and Housing Market Renewal (improvements to housing in deprived areas). Cost £450m. • Young Person's Guarantee - £450m has been cut from the Guarantee, which will be abolished in April 2011. This Guarantee promised unemployed young people access to a job, training or work after six months of unemployment. • Working Neighbourhood Fund - This fund, which aimed to help unemployed people in deprived areas to move into work, has been cut by £49.9m. The TUC is calling on the government to reconsider its plan of swingeing spending cuts to public services, and focus instead on other ways to reduce the deficit. Yesterday, on the 99th day of the coalition government, the chancellor George Osborne declared that the cuts made by his government would be a "genuinely collective effort" and said that the government would be "laying the future foundations for economic growth and for a fairer society". Osborne said the government is running a "wide and inclusive" public engagement programme to inform the spending review, which will be announced on 20 October and said the government had received more than 100,00 ideas "from people keen to help us find ways to make savings and transform the public sector". In parallel with this consultation process, Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander has been meeting ministers to discuss their departmental savings and the public expenditure sub-committee starts its weekly meetings at the end of August. The spending review is a "genuinely collective effort," said Osborne - "collective around the Cabinet table and collective with the British public". The government plans to cut public spending by a total of £113bn by 2014-15, of which £61bn will come from cuts to departmental spending.