Osborne to slash £10bn from welfare budget

The chancellor’s announcement follows his disclosure in a weekend interview that the government will offer English local authorities money for a third successive council tax freeze. Details of the offer are expected to be revealed by Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles later today. Pickles will also announce that the level of council tax rises requiring a local referendum will be lowered from 3.5% to 2%.

Osborne told the conference that further welfare cuts were needed to ensure other departmental budgets could be protected beyond the end of the current Spending Review.

He said the coalition’s published plans for a further two years of spending cuts from 2015/16, first set out in last year’s Autumn Statement, required ‘£16bn of further savings’.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has now agreed to find £10bn of savings ‘by the first full year of the next Parliament’, Osborne revealed. But he would continue to introduce the new Universal Credit, which merges many existing benefits.
Osborne said the reductions were ‘not just about the money’ but were needed to encourage ‘fairness and enterprise’.

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