IFS: ‘Lock’ gives Labour ‘enormous amount of flexibility’ on cuts

Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told BBC’s Daily Politics voters “would not know what they were voting for” regarding Labour’s planned spending cuts.

The Labour party have repeated what they have said over the last several months, which is that they want to get to get to current budget balanced as soon as they can in the next parliament.

Now, it really, really matters how soon that is. If they want to get there within three years, which is sort of what they might be thought to have signed up to in the fiscal responsibility charter earlier this year, that’s a really significant amount of spending cuts or tax rises over the next three years.

If they are happy to wait til the end of the parliament, which is also sort of consistent with what they signed up to, then actually we don’t need any spending cuts over the next five years.

So, which one of those paths really, really matters. And we’ve got no additional clarity today about whether we would be signing up to additional spending cuts or tax rises or not.

It gives them an enormous amount of flexibility; it allows them to say well we would be cutting very little, but also that we would be cutting. But it really makes a big difference, there’s a huge difference between £18bn of cuts over the next three years and no cuts. Literally we would not know what we were voting for if we were going to vote for Labour.