Minister says spending review will mark 'end to austerity', as Home Office yet to agree deal - UK politics live

Minister says spending review will mark 'end to austerity', as Home Office yet to agree deal - UK politics live
Source: The Guardian

Good morning. In theory spending review negotiations can go up to the wire, with the final talks to resolve sticking points taking place late at night, only hours before the final decisions, and documents, are presented to MPs. In practice, it does not really happen like that now, last-minute haggling is no longer routine, and, with two days to go before the spending review that will settle government spending until 2019, only one cabinet minister has not yet settled.

Here are the key developments this morning on the issue that will dominate the week.

The i Paper understands that Rayner and Reeves agreed a deal just after 7.30pm after marathon talks on Sunday.

But Home Office and Treasury sources were tight-lipped on Sunday, in an indication that negotiations over police funding are also going to the wire.

It is understood that Reeves has insisted that policing budgets will rise in each year of the spending review, which sets funding up to 2028-29. However, it remains unclear if the boost will match the more than £1 billion extra officers say is needed to cover existing shortfalls.

Cooper is also expected to have to find deeper cuts elsewhere to boost police budgets. The Border Force has warned of longer queues at airports as it faces cuts to its £1.2 billion budget, saying there would be a "threat to national security" if it lost frontline staff.

Police are being asked to do more with less - again - as pressure mounts on already overstretched budgets.

Why? Policing faces a £1.2 billion shortfall. This is before it is asked to deliver the ambitious pledges of the new government.

Police forces across the country are being forced to shed officers and staff to deliver savings.

These are not administrative cuts. They go to the core of policing's ability to deliver a quality service: fewer officers on the beat, longer wait times for victims, and less available officers when a crisis hits.

As a practical lobbying exercise, this is fairly pointless because it comes too late, but the two unions are making their case to the public.

We know from running the government that spending money of itself isn't an achievement. Spending money and getting results is an achievement and that's why we are saying now with this spending review on Wednesday it's an end to austerity ...
That period of austerity where I think previous governments simply cut all public service budgets just because they believed that was what you had to do is over.

But he also said some budgets would be "stretched". He said health and defence spending would rise, but added:

There are going to be other parts of the budget that are going to be much more stretched and be difficult.

Ministers have been promising the end of austerity at least since Theresa May was in office. Labour defend using the term on the grounds that overall government spending is going up in real terms. But there is no agreed definition of "austerity" and, if spending is falling in certain areas, that may feel like austerity, and so using the term does not contribute a lot to public debate. What it does mean, though, is government not wanting to be associated with George Osborne.

Here is our overnight story about the spending review.

Noon: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, gives a speech at Port Talbot in south Wales.

2.30pm: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Also, Starmer is meeting Mark Rutte, the Nato general secretary, in Downing Street today.

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