A challenge ahead (From Durham Times)

A challenge ahead

12:47pm Wednesday 30th December 2009

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(0)

AS 2010 looms, are there grounds for optimism in the new year? Uncertainty is still the greatest threat to those who look to the turn of the year for a change in economic fortunes. One certainty we have is that 2009 was a terrible year and there is no consensus about how 2010 will turn out.

One other certainty is that we will have a new Government come the summer. The Conservatives look set fair for power, if for no other reason than the nation’s palpable desire for change after the Labour years.

Whoever forms the next Government, the issue of 2010 and the years that follow will be the scale of public spending cuts that everyone, bar the Prime Minster perhaps, acknowledges will have to be implemented.

The political battleground in the coming months will be how those cuts will be made. Can frontline teachers, nurses, doctors, carers and police be protected while the “backoffice”

functions are streamlined. Can “efficiencies” be made on the scale necessary to bring down public borrowing and avoid the UK becoming one of the world’s financial basket cases?

If the administration in power come June can outline a programme that delivers on those essentials, then we might all be feeling a good deal happier – if not wealthier – at the end of the year.

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(0)