980

May 5 - 11 2010 No. 980

THE WEEKLY WORLD EDITION OF The Daily Telegraph AND The Sunday Telegraph telegraph.co.uk/expat

The Telegraph

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The Institute for Fiscal Studies criticised Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats last week for not being frank with the public about the drastic measures needed to repair the government’s finances.

The institute claimed that the parties have black holes of up to £52 billion in the economic plans they have published as part of the

General Election campaign. The average family already faces tax rises of more than £500 a year in the face of a £1trillion deficit. But, according to the IFS, Labour will need to increase taxes by another £7billion a year — the equivalent of a further £200 per family — under its economic plan and the Conservatives will need to raise taxes by about £3 billion.

Under Labour and Lib Dem policies, public spending would face the biggest cuts since the 1970s, because they intend to raise more tax than the Conservatives, the IFS calculated.

Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have not come ‘anywhere close’ to identifying how spending plans or the billions of pounds in tax rises will be achieved By Robert Winnett and Edmund Conway VOTERS are being kept in the dark by all three main political parties, which have failed to disclose the scale of tax rises and public sector cuts required to tackle the financial crisis, Britain’s leading economic forecaster has warned.

choice, the parties need to explain clearly how they would go about achieving it. Unfortunately, they have not.

“The opposition parties have not even set out their fiscal targets clearly. The blame for that lies primarily with the Government for refusing to hold a spending review before the election.”

A government run by any of the main parties would find it impossible to cut public services as sharply as they have proposed, it claimed.

Tory plans to cut the deficit by more than £70 billion over the next parliament would result in a squeeze on government spending not seen since the 1920s, institute figures suggested.

The IFS said it was “striking” how reticent the main parties had been in explaining the “defining task of the next administration”. The economists warned that none of the parties had come “anywhere close” to identifying how their spending plans might be achieved, and said that welfare benefits may have to be cut, raising the prospect of means-testing for universal payments such as child benefit.

Robert Chote, the director of the IFS, said: “For the voters to be able to make an informed

Gordon Brown has been anxious not to focus on the country’s debts in case it highlighted his questionable record as Chancellor.

David Cameron was among the first to warn of the dangers posed by the deficit but has recently campaigned on more positive policies and even pledged tax cuts.

Lib Dem policies have been scrutinised far less than the other two parties but this has changed since their sudden rise to prominence following Nick Clegg’s success in the television debates.

According to the IFS, the Conservatives have the biggest black hole in their economic plans. Mr Cameron has set out plans to cut annual borrowing by more than his rivals, reducing it from £170 billion to less than £100 billion over the next few years. However, he has set out public spending cuts of only £11.3 billion and tax rises of about £11billion, leaving a £52.4 billion gap, according to the IFS.

The Labour black hole is estimated at £44.1billion, while the Lib Dems have the smallest unexplained gap, estimated at £34.5billion.

However, the IFS described

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