The Independent’s Ben Chu reports: “Public services, including health, are set to experience a severe and prolonged squeeze in the coming years, despite the chancellor’s loosening of the government’s fiscal rules, and that austerity will stretch ‘well into the 2020s’, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
“In its annual ‘Green Budget‘, released ahead of the chancellor’s annual fiscal statement next month, the IFS points out that on current plans and adjusted for expected inflation, public spending will be 13 percent lower on 2010-11 levels by 2019-20.
“This implies a cut of around 40 percent to the budgets of the justice department, business, culture and the environment over the decade.”