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Comprehensive Spending Review

The hon. Lady is the shadow Chief Secretary, and we read in a memo directed to the Leader of the Opposition that the Opposition had a plan for £44 billion of cuts, but she has not set out a single piece of detail on that. As I said, Departments will set out their work force plans in due course. The previous Government's plan was not a serious plan to deal with the deficit and support growth. It was not a fair approach. It would have led to more, not fewer, cuts in the end, because of higher debt and higher interest payments—more interest on the debt, and more interest on the interest. Compared with the plans that we inherited, we will save £5 billion in debt interest payments over the course of this Parliament. The emergency Budget set out our plan to balance the books, and now we have shown how we will find £81 billion of savings by 2014-15. Let me put that in some context. Even at the end of that period, public spending as a share of gross domestic product will be 41%.