Philip Hammond has made public services nothing but a coy promise

https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2018/mar/13/spring-statement-public-sector-philip-hammon-brexit

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The chancellor’s spring statement is not even “jam tomorrow”. It’s a promise that the government will get an empty jar out next year and think about its future contents.

Public servants are stoical. By their nature they think the best of people: to be resilient is to have confidence in what is to come. But they would have to be preternaturally optimistic if they believed Hammond’s pie-eyed glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s not just the long term reduction in the GDP growth rate, which small and probably temporary upticks can’t conceal, nor the short-sighted meanness of Tory social policies, piling up demand for services already stretched beyond the limit. Where in the spring statement was any mention of redistributing existing resources through the tax system for essential public services – beyond ritual incantation about getting HMRC to collect more?

HMRC’s chunk of that £1.5bn public service “extra” spending for Brexit announced last year amounts to sterile spending on customs sheds, in the midst of Brexit-induced cuts in overall economic prospects. Some departments are enjoying a boost to their staffing levels as they rush to fill Brexit’s many gaps. But not all: among Whitehall’s pressure sores has to be prisons, probation and other Ministry of Justice responsibilities. The Hammond message to them seems to be nothing more than please, please hold on.

But for how long, and then what? A spending review that does not start till 2019 can’t be put into operation until the financial year starting in April 2020. Of course it’s possible that the Treasury will then open its coffers, shoulder aside the ever-more-hapless communities department and address the crisis in local services, including adult social care.

But that leaves public managers having to struggle through 21 months. Between the lines of its gloomy report on local government, the National Audit Office predicts casualties. Where does the next domino fall after Northamptonshire – Oxfordshire, Kingston upon Thames, Buckinghamshire?

The intervening period will inflict further long-term damage on the NHS as recruitment plummets, and public health and preventive work becomes even more vulnerable, storing up problems for tomorrow. But even the word “intervening” means believing in Hammond’s coy promises about spending to come. And ignoring his nods and winks about using any largesse to cut tax.

A spending review worth the name would have to address precarious work, social care and other aspects of ageing, sustainability and, of course, tax. All spending reviews must be taxation reviews. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has set it out, for the umpteenth time: we can’t have decent levels of public service on the US levels of tax Hammond’s backbenchers are baying for. But there are specific and, let’s face it, ideological reasons why a Conservative government won’t see extra tax as simultaneously the way to cut borrowing and the means of paying for decent levels of public services.

The other day the Commons foreign affairs committee produced a report on global Britain – a bit of an oxymoron, concluded the MPs.

What the report said the Foreign Office needs from Theresa May’s cabinet, “substance, resources and clear priorities”, applies to the public service at large. Hammond’s non-event supplied none of those things.

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