This week sees the Chancellor unveil his much anticipated spending review. The task at hand is clear: the Government needs to find a further £11.5 billion in spending cuts in 2015-16. The uncertainty is how the pain will be shared across departments. As is to be expected, the cuts are much harder to find this time around than they were in 2010 because the fat has already been trimmed. It is now a matter of deciding between equally important priorities.
Once again, the Government has announced its intention to protect some areas of spending from the worst of the cuts: international development, the NHS and education. But the protections for education can be misleading. Within the Department for Education, only the schools budget is protected, putting greater pressure on other parts of the budget, including early years. With the introduction of the new two-year-old childcare offer, funding for other early years provision will be harder and harder to find. If children’s centres have weathered the storm for the last three years, remaining open will become increasingly difficult.
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