UK Government Announced Expenditure Cuts- Consequences for Public Services - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages This, as the general population has already in part voiced an opinion via the results of recent polls that have punished those in power for the spending cuts that were already instituted, via voters electing into office those who are opposed to the current government and its programs of austerity and expenditure cuts. Already the impacts of such expenditure cuts, moreover, have included sharp reductions in the payments made by government towards welfare, as well as deep cuts in the roster of employees in the public sector. The latter arguably may have both camps in the debate arguing about how such deep cuts in the employee count in the public sector impacts the provision of public services in the UK. Moreover, reduced spending for welfare directly strikes at the heart of what government intends to provide its citizens in terms of public services tied to welfare, as they pertain for instance to those who are unemployed, and as they pertain to the provision of vital health services especially for those sectors of British society unable to cover for their own healthcare needs without the benefit of welfare services provided by the UK government. ...
2010; Kane and Allen 2011). Discussion A. Expenditure Cuts At the time that the expenditure cuts were announced in 2010, they were deemed to be, taken together, the largest such cuts to be instituted in the expenditures of the UK government since the second world war, with the scale of the cuts cutting through vital public services, including welfare, and envisioned to pare down the government workforce by half a million civil servants, en route to balancing the budget, from yearly deficit estimated at 156 billion pounds in 2009. Then chief of Treasury George Osborne, referring to the magnitude of the public sector spending deficit, called the UK a “debt supertanker”, depicting the deficit problem in gargantuan imagery, in order to stress the point that the deficit situation was urgent, damaging, and threatening to the future viability of government, and therefore necessitated the cutbacks in expenditure. The short of it was that government deemed the then state of affairs of government spending as unsustainable in the long term. The non-sustainability of spending meant that government had to step in and try to rein in the spending. That was the gist of the plan, and government envisioned the cuts to be undertaken over a period of half a decade, gradually cutting back on spending through all of the government's different functions, departments, and agencies, with the goal of reversing the deficit spending and putting the government finances on an even keel, as a way of securing its long-term viability. The cuts in spending was estimated to reach 83 billion pounds by 2015, with the rest of the funding to wipe out the deficit to come from increases in taxation (The Associated Press 2010; Stringer 2012). Aside from the cuts in public sector ...Download file to see next pagesRead More