Conservative – Lib Dem coalition programme: reaction and analysis

The new coalition’s programme for government has now been released. Overall, while there is a lot of good news for local authorities in the plans, it’s clear that the new government still has a lot of thinking to do. This means there will be plenty of opportunity to influence policy in the coming months.

The first important point to note is that the coalition’s plan states that ‘the deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in [the] agreement’. There are three key milestones on this.

• On May 24th, George Osborne will announce £6bn of cuts to ‘non-front-line services’ that will take effect in this financial year (2010/11).
• On June 22nd, an emergency budget will set departmental spending totals for the period 2011/12 to 2013/14. This will identify the major cuts in public spending that will be introduced over the next spending period in order to reduce the UK’s structural deficit.
• In autumn 2010, a spending review will report. This will provide more detail on departmental spending within the limits already set in the emergency budget.

Significant cuts in local authority budgets are practically inevitable. The Centre for Cities will be holding a roundtable later in 2010 to discuss how cities should manage these cuts and we’ll be following the debate and providing analysis on it throughout the year.

As well as the full analysis available for download below, we’ve highlighted some of the main points for cities in this round-up.