‘22bn black hole’

[EverythingAllatOnceAllTheTime]

Labour refuses to disclose key details of alleged 22bn ‘black hole’.

What is it with Labour? They seem hell-bent on implementing some bonkers tax rises, premised on some very dubious data.

Their latest rental reform proposals are also utterly daft, and will deliver the opposite of what they are trying to achieve.

Agreed!
I think it's crazy they keep repeating this without evidence and people are lapping it up!

We have to remember there is no way (rightly or wrongly) the torys would have agreed to the junior doctors and public sector pay rises. The cost being 10bn. So that is money the labour govt would have needed to find!

I was about to tell you not to be so ridiculous with your conspiracy theories, and then I remembered that as a former civil servant, the things I take for granted are not things that everyone else believes or knows to be factual. But now Labour have come right out and said it.

So, yes there is a massive hole, the Treasury is very very worried about it and has been for LITERALLY YEARS, a significant amount of it is due to supporting an ageing population and just because you didn't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There you go.

Thousands of civil servants who have no particular political axe to grind are working on projects to try and rescue the country from this cliff edge, I was one of them about 6-7 years ago.

I guess this report outlines where there has been sustained under budgeting.

"n recent years, the Home Office has repeatedly spent far more than it had budgeted for asylum, border, visa and passport operations...

The Home Office has got into the bad habit of each year submitting Main Estimates to parliament that it knew would be insufficient, relying on a top-up from the Treasury Reserve later in the year."

ifs.org.uk/articles/home-office-budgeting-and-asylum-overspends

I'm afraid it's another case that shows the inexperience of this government, the communication and timing has been so inept It makes Liz Truss look good.

I dread to think what they have in mind for October.

It’s strange because the initial narrative was that Labour created the ‘black hole’ in the first week or so of power, due to agreeing spending (such as public sector pay rises) and Miliband’s rather poorly informed energy decisions etc. It literally all added up to 22bn. Now apparently it’s the Conservatives’ fault? Which doesn’t make any sense at all because Labour had open access to the ‘books!’

This is the point though, isn't it? It's not new news. It was obvious and was known about. Several journalists were talking about it during the election and wondering why it wasn't a huge topic - the reason it wasn't (on Labour's side) is because they wanted to claim it was a complete surprise upon their election and so all their "fully costed" promises could be discarded.

I dint know about the rental reforms. But the conservatives were constantly saying there was no money and had to be cutbacks so I can't see that Labour is saying anything different really. One said make savings as there was no money, the other said increase money raised.

Well a quick google tells you!

•	Public sector pay rises
•	Overspending on certain projects, such as supporting the asylum system (£6.2B on Asylum housing costs alone)
•	Unforeseen costs, such as inflation being higher than expected
•	Military assistance to Ukraine

There’s another enormous hole - in your assertion.

Are you seriously suggesting that the civil service/obr etc didn’t open their books during campaigning?

Utter nonsense, or it’s the fault of the civil service. Which is it please?

In the past months, there was back and forth on whether the 22 billion hole came as a surprise or not. Top civil service chief Simon Case has backed up Rachel Reeves against former Treasury lead Jeremy Hunt, saying that, yes, some of it was not fully clear, due to the departments not providing full information and doing the right reviews in time. This had been mentioned as a concern by civil servants at the time, but was ignored by Conservative ministers. Although it was known there was a problem (see IFS messaging on this to both Labour and Conservatives pre-election), the extent of it wasn't fully clear.

Spending on junior doctors and train drivers saves money in the huge economic damage their strikes cost (which vastly outweighs the costs of giving them more wages, and was being carried by society, business, etc. at large, not just the government).

So, there you go.

www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/sep/03/civil-service-chief-backs-government-claim-of-22bn-shortfall

Citing your source, the IFS.

Also note that Labour are not prepared to breakdown the 22bn.

Yes, the Tories left Labour a mess to clear up but it’s disingenuous for Rachel Reeves to claim that taxes might have to rise to fund predictable public sector pay rises.

A week on from Rachel Reeves’s big reveal that there is a £22 billion “black hole” in the nation’s finances, what are we to make of the claims and counterclaims and, more importantly, what can we learn?

Frankly, nobody comes out of this smelling of roses. Not the Conservatives who really did leave a lot for the new government to clear up, and were not honest about the challenges ahead. Not Labour, which knew the broad outline of these challenges, but refused to confront them in its manifesto and pre-election statements. And not our institutional framework, which meant that some of the immediate problems were allowed to fester and were obscured in the official data.

Sunak was right….

@juniperbramble
The difficulty is, the LP are beginning to sound themselves a bit like Cameron did over austerity. If absolutely everything is a surprise to them, what were they doing in opposition?

I see the state of the NHS was a shock to them this morning. I'm beginning to think we are being treated like idiots. And I have always voted Labour, and I'm over 60 now.

They need to change the record a bit and treat us like adults. I think they have a plan and they are instead pretending that it is a new situational response. It's undignified.

Hopefully the Labour politicians will go on strike soon.

I've posted this on another thread -

In his report, Lord Darzi said the “Health and Social Care Act of 2012 was a calamity without international precedent. It proved disastrous.” He added: “In the last 15 years, the NHS was hit by three shocks — ­austerity and starvation of investment, confusion caused by top-down ­reorganisation, and then the pandemic, which came with resilience at an all-time low. Two out of three of those shocks were choices made in West­minster.”

"Darzi said the 2012 reforms represented a “scorched-earth approach to health reform” as it dissolved NHS management structures in a “uniquely complicated piece of legislation”. The reforms established more than 300 new NHS organisations, which led to “institutional confusion”, from which the NHS was still recovering."

I dont know how you can read this report and think it has been well run.

www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/lord-darzi-report-nhs-review-6td77lqdw

Well that's certainly true.

If a "significant amount of it is due to supporting an ageing population" then I wonder why the civil servants like yourself who have been working so hard on a solution for years haven't concluded that maybe phasing out public sector final salary schemes might be a good idea after all.

The private sector has done this, maybe it's finally time for the public sector to accept that they might have to follow suit. Or are all the civil servants too invested in saving their own pensions?

Because the civil service are partisan and probably wfh.

lol @RockaLock I'm no longer a civil servant. However they're already underpaid due to years of austerity and pay freezes. And the civil service pension scheme has already had a very dramatic reform (and haircut) about ten years ago.

In fact it was such a severe reduction in benefits that there have been repercussions in the private sector about it.

Several large British corporations actually pegged their own in-house pension schemes to the civil service years ago because that was the "gold standard" - only to be sued when the standard fell so far that it was now worth so much less.

And whoever bitched about "wfh" can fuck right off. I've wfh on and off since 2012 with three different employers and the only difference it makes is having 2.5 hours less commuting time per day and more time to get work done, and a lot more negative attention since 2021, coincidentally since the Tories stopped listening to Murdoch who's been retaliating by pushing this agenda in the news. And you always get lower pay when flexibility is a key need.

So many civil servants are working mums, and it's that way for a reason. It's tough enough working for lower pay just to get a bit of flexibility without people constantly bitching from a position of privilege.

Get back in the office like the private sector.
Earn your keep.
The clue is in the name ‘civil service’.

Theres very little sympathy outside the public sector.

what does this have to do with the topic? Labour refuse to disclose the details

This is what OP refers to

UK Treasury refuses to disclose key details of £22bn fiscal ‘black hole’ (ft.com)

OP, I'm with you. It's a real insult on one's intelligence.
But I'm not surprised people are falling for it.

@MorphandMindy That black hole was created in one day by Liz Truss! Don't blame the elderly.

And Covid!

I wonder if it includes all the bounce back loans and coronavrius loans that are yet to be paid back and will start to be claimed upon against the government guarantee.

Countries finance are in a bad way… it’s been like this since Brexit , and make worse by Covid and Truss

How? And if it was caused by Truss why won't the government release the information? It wouldn't be their fault so if I was in their position I'd be shouting from the rooftops and have no problem releasing the information but instead they have denied a FOI request.