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| Osborne should spell out welfare cuts, says IFS | Osborne should spell out welfare cuts, says IFS |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Chancellor George Osborne needs to spell out exactly how he plans to cut £12bn from welfare spending, says the independent forecaster the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). | |
| Only £2bn of these £12bn cuts have been outlined so far, said IFS director Paul Johnson, in response to the Budget. | |
| Yet all the cuts are supposed to be in place by 2017-18, he said. | Yet all the cuts are supposed to be in place by 2017-18, he said. |
| "It is time we knew more about what they might actually involve," Mr Johnson added. | "It is time we knew more about what they might actually involve," Mr Johnson added. |
| Spending cuts planned for 2016-17 and 2017-18 would be "twice the size of any year's cuts over this parliament", said Mr Johnson, if the £12bn of cuts already announced and the Chancellor's hoped-for £5bn of anti tax avoidance measures failed to materialise. | |
| Household incomes | |
| Commenting on the economic effect of the recession and the government's tax and benefit changes, Mr Johnson said UK households had experienced "the slowest recovery in incomes in modern history". | |
| While average household incomes have "just about" regained their pre-recession levels, the recovery had not been felt equally by all sections of society, he said. | |
| "Average incomes among pensioners have risen, among those of working age they have fallen, with especially big falls for those in their 20s," said Mr Johnson. | |
| Earnings, taking the effect of inflation into account, have fallen, but should still be above their 2010 levels, he continued. | |
| "We are for sure much worse off on average than we could reasonably have expected to be back in 2007 or indeed back in 2010," he said. | |
| The IFS concluded that the richest have been "hit hardest" by the government's tax changes over the last parliament. | |
| But it said that benefit cuts had "hit low income working age people". |