IRRV Alert - week ending 12th July 2019
News
Circulars
Consultations
OBR and IFS evidence in Parliament on DWP spending plans (10 July 2019)
OBR and IFS evidence in Parliament on DWP spending plans
Last month the Committee called for evidence on what DWP’s spending priorities should be over the next three years, and invited “model budgets” to suggest what DWP’s spending plan could look like, and what trade-offs it might have to make. On Wednesday in the first oral evidence hearing of this inquiry, the Committee invites views from Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Paul Johnson and Robert Chote, Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility.
In March of last year the Committee criticised DWP for what it described as a “clumsy and ill-judged attempt to piggyback on one of the most trusted, unimpugnable authorities on public policy and finance”, when the Department attempted to defend some of its claims for the employment benefits of Universal Credit using IFS research. At the time, Paul Johnson wrote to the Committee noting that "Sadly, it will be difficult even after the event to produce convincing estimates of the overall employment impact (
PDF 197 KB)
of UC.”
Ahead of the 2017 Budget, the OBR noted that the lack of data on the employment effects of Universal Credit were hampering efforts at accurate economic forecasting. In this session the Committee will be asking the OBR about future trends in welfare spending and DWP’s use of evidence to inform its plans.
In its 2018 “Green Budget”, the IFS argued that the “The Chancellor faces extremely tough choices over next year’s Spending Review”, in particular that “keeping to the provisional spending totals used in the Spring Statement would mean continued cuts for many areas of public service spending” and that the Chancellor “will then need to trade off spending on public services against spending on social security” – the largest component of UK public spending outside of departmental expenditure – and that “…there are a number of reasons why making substantial savings from further cuts to social security could prove difficult.”