Treasury minister issues warning to departments which fail to make 5% savings as he paves way for further cuts
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Darren Jones warned that Britain is ‘long overdue a reckoning with government spending’. Treasury minister Darren Jones signalled further cuts as he told government departments they must meet the minimum 5 per cent savings target required before they will receive any fresh funding.
Giving a speech at the Institute for Government’s (IfG) annual conference on Tuesday, which saw him put his Cabinet colleagues on notice over their department’s budgets, the chief secretary to the Treasury warned that Britain is “long overdue a reckoning with government spending”.
Mr Jones is leading Labour’s spending review, which will determine how much money departments will get over the coming years. He has said he will adopt a “zero-based” approach that requires every pound the government spends to be fully justified.
“As a moderniser with an optimism about the future for Britain, I just do not accept the idea that we should just keep spending more and more money for continued poor outcomes”, the Mr Jones said. “Taxpayers and the users of public services obviously deserve better. We therefore won’t settle for doing things the same and hoping for a different result, we have to do things differently, and we will.
“That is why funding from the Treasury to support new priorities will only be made available to departments that have first fulfilled the requirements of our zero-based review and met the minimum 5 per cent savings and efficiency target required in this spending review process.”.
