UK government departments to face more spending cuts

Whitehall departments are to face additional budget cuts totaling £3 billion over the next three years, Britain’s Treasury says.

British Chancellor George Osborne and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander wrote to Cabinet colleagues on Wednesday to inform them about the reductions aimed at fixing the country’s public finances.

Under the spending cuts, set to be announced in Osborne’s Autumn Statement on Thursday, the British government will cut the money from Whitehall staff and administration costs by £1 billion a year up to the end of the financial year 2015-16.

The saving is planned to be achieved through cuts of 1.1 percent across departmental budgets over the next three years.

However, security services, local governments, schools, and health sector institutions will be exempt from the cuts.

In a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet last month, British Prime Minister David Cameron said austerity measures will continue in order to tackle the country’s mounting debts and sluggish growth if the Conservative Party wins the next general election in 2015.

According to the European Union’s statistics authority Eurostat, Britain’s budget deficit was 6.3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012, putting the country just behind debt-ravaged Spain, Ireland, Greece and Portugal in the worst-performing EU economies.

The coalition government billed its £50-billion austerity program, launched in 2010, in a bid to rein in a staggering national debt of £1 trillion, equal to 70 percent of the GDP, by 2015.