What to make of the Spending Review speech?

What we heard certainly had one key ingredient. It sketched out a long term future, one of the key requests emerging from our Citizen's Jury work in July. There was an emphasis on growth, and ways to get there - particularly protecting science and education, which has strong echos of Sweden and Finland's successful deficit reductions in the 1990s. And the Chancellor spoke a lot about cutting the things the public instinctively do not like. So whenever we got a confirmation of another departmental budget being cut, the effects were discussed in terms of eliminating waste, cutting inflated cost bases, etc. Nobody wants their taxes spent on such things, so such measures are a key theme of the "achieving fairness through tackling unfairness" chapter of the handbook. But was this over done? Transparency is important for successful deficit reductions.  As I’ve blogged before, people will be facing the real pain of cuts on this scale for themselves in the near future. The handbook would emphasise the need to be upfront about all the consequences. Was there enough about what the cuts in, say, law and order budgets or the reductions for local councils might really mean in practice? And now the difficult part Finally this was all part of the planning phase. The trick with deficit reductions is to actually implement them. In the Canadian example often cited by the Prime Minister (and discussed in our briefing note, Smaller and Better? Whitehall after the cuts) it was over a year post-election before they announced their plans - we've done it in less than six months. And remember our plans are very ambitious by the standards of successful consolidations - for one example just look at how the cuts will affect Whitehall itself. Has there been enough time to make sure managers throughout the public sector believe the savings are achievable, and will actually go out and make them happen? So ultimately history's judgement of the Spending Review is in the hands of the public sector - one that the government is convinced is overblown and inefficient. There must be a chapter on irony somewhere in the handbook...