The Chancellor has today (Oct 21) announced that a one-year spending review will take place to assess the impacts that Coronavirus has had on budgets.
The Government have made clear for months that they intended to regularly review spending to ensure that services are kept at a high standard, despite the ongoing pandemic that the country finds itself in.
The spending review will outline Government department’s resource and capital budgets for 2020/21, as well as review devolved administrations block grants for that year.
The Government believes that short-term reviews are a more effective way to provide funds, as with the everchanging landscape of Covid-19, nothing is permanent, and budgets need to be able to reflect that.
The Spending Review will build on that support and focus on three areas:
- Providing departments with the certainty they need to tackle Covid-19 and deliver our Plan for Jobs to support employment.
- Giving our vital public services enhanced support to continue to fight against the virus alongside delivering first class frontline services.
- Investing in infrastructure to deliver our ambitious plans to unite and level up the country, drive our economic recovery and Build Back Better.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, said:
“In the current environment its essential that we provide certainty. So we’ll be doing that for departments and all of the nations of the United Kingdom by setting budgets for next year, with a total focus on tackling Covid and delivering our Plan for Jobs.
“Long term investment in our country’s future is the right thing to do, especially in areas which are the cornerstone of our society like the NHS, schools and infrastructure. We’ll make sure these areas crucial to our economic recovery have their budgets set for further years so they can plan and help us Build Back Better.”
