Manifestos leave voters guessing about cuts, says IFS

Party manifestos published ahead of the the General Election have been condemned by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for being too vague about where cuts would fall.

The think-tank’s analysis, 'Post-election Austerity: Parties' Plans Compared', published today, suggests neither the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats nor the SNP have given sufficient detail in their spending plans for the next UK parliament.

The Conservatives need to find much more substantial spending cuts, while Labour and the SNP would have to reduce the deficit and debt significantly more slowly, the report suggests.

“None of these parties has provided anything like full details of their fiscal plans for each year of the coming parliament, leaving the electorate somewhat in the dark as to both the scale and composition of likely spending cuts and tax increases,” the paper concludes.

The Conservatives’ plans lack detail, according to the IFS. Planned cuts to social security spending would only provide a tenth of what they have said they would deliver, according to the paper, leaving ‘unprotected’ areas such as defence, transport, law and order, and social care facing cuts of around 17.9 per cent.

Labour is accused of being “vague” on its borrowing commitments or for explaining how the party would deliver a budget surplus, while the Liberal Democrats are accused of being overly optimistic about how much they could raise from unspecified measures to reduce tax avoidance.

The SNP “are the one major party not to have used largely made up assumptions about how much they could raise from clamping down on tax avoidance to try to make their sums add up”.

However, the paper warns of a “considerable disconnect” between the party’s rhetoric on austerity and their stated plans for total spending, which the party suggests will be lower by 2019-20 than Labour’s offer. "They would cut less to start with but the implication of the plans they have spelt out in their manifesto is that the period of austerity would be longer than under the other three parties we consider."​

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon used First Minister's Questions today to accuse the IFS of "miss-assumptions" about her party's plans for borrowing. 

IFS deputy director Carl Emmerson said while the parties did offer the electorate “a real choice”, the public “can at best only see the broad outlines of that choice”.