“Do ministers want us to change the chart so the public won’t be able to see how much the cuts hurt them?” That was the rhetorical question I asked my boss as a young economist working in the Treasury in 2015. The Conservatives had just won a majority and, being an Ed Miliband fan, I was nursing a broken heart.
George Osborne’s first act as chancellor after the 2015 general election would turn out to be massive social security cuts for working parents. The “chart” part of my job was distributional analysis, showing the public how much people would gain (or more likely lose) from the taxation and social security cuts in that summer’s Budget. Had we produced the chart, which we never did, it would have shown the poorest losing over £1,000 a year.
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