Defining 'front-line services'

Warmer souls would at least acknowledge that a person's job, family, life, community and hope lie behind every cold statistic. All tax and cut options have consequences.

Chancellor George Osborne and his LibDem deputy this week paraded what they called their draconian plans for cutting public spending without detailing the pain this would mean for many thousands who will lose their livelihoods.

We are assured that some front-line services and jobs will be protected with the implication that we won't be too much affected by cuts behind the scenes.

It doesn't just happen to someone else, though. How does the social worker or benefits adviser operate effectively without the unseen computer programmer or wages clerk?

Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers argues that,

"You can't have schools that aren't cleaned or don't have lunches provided or have no one answering the phones."

I have, therefore, tabled questions asking each government department to tell me how many front-line and non-front-line staff are employed by them or their agencies and at what cost.

Cutting spending on jobs does not mean that the deficit is reduced by the same amount. If you add the costs of redundancy payments, unemployment benefits and lost taxes and spending power into the equation, the savings dramatically diminish. The cuts also impact on private companies that rely on government contracts. This vicious cycle could tip us into a double-dip recession.

I accept that the longer term health of our economy requires reducing our deficit, much of which was needed to stop the recession turning into a deep economic depression. It's how it is done that matters. The choices are deeply political.

I am worried, for example, that the superficially plausible idea of raising the starting point when people start to pay tax to £10,000 will little help many people on low or modest incomes but will unfairly benefit the better off and add to the pressure for deeper cuts in public services.

I am very concerned that the coalition could hike VAT from 17.5 to say 20% and extend it to currently exempt goods which would sting very many people, especially on lower wages. I am tabling parliamentary questions to establish who will lose and benefit from such changes.

Much of the pain should be borne by those who can most afford it. The government should impose a Robin Hood tax - a small global levy on all financial transactions. After all, greedy banks were reckless in the extreme and got us into this mess in the first place. This tax could raise £20 billion a year in the UK alone.

Massive levels of corporate and fat cat tax avoidance which deny billions to the taxpayer should also be tackled.

The initial reduction of £6 billion is small compared to cuts coming later this year. The North East is in the firing line because our public sector employment is deemed excessive. Kevin Rowan of the Northern TUC rightly counters this by saying that,

"We are highly reliant on the public sector for employment because of mass job losses in the 1980s and 1990s. That was down to the economic policies of the Conservatives that decimated the industrial base. It now seems as if they are coming back to finish the job."

Regional inequalities will be worsened.

The coalition says private sector growth is key to recovery whilst bludgeoning the public sector. However, it's not an either-or. We need a co-operative mixed economy in which good government nurtures private and public enterprise to boost new industries, jobs, services and markets.

My job locally and nationally is to expose choices that do more harm than good to the country and to encourage informed debate about the options. We shouldn't take things lying down.

Newcastle Chronicle and Journal