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Andy Burnham repeatedly claims that he can fund defence using savings from the welfare budget – just not the ‘crude cuts’ that the Tories want him to make. But today his own adviser on youth unemployment has rather undermined that: Alan Milburn has confirmed to the Financial Times that the plans he has for Neets will cost more money upfront and take time to produce savings. ‘Honestly, in order to fix this, if we’re going to get to anywhere near the [Neet] levels of Holland or even Belgium, that that is not going to happen in two or three years,’ he said. He added: ‘If we’re going to put in more support for young people… of course we’re going to have to invest behind that’.
Burnham has a much better way of talking about the morality of reforming welfare than his predecessor
This is not a surprise. Proper welfare reform is very much not the same as welfare cuts, even though in time it can deliver better and more sustainable savings than simply lopping chunks out of the budget. The key phrase here is ‘in time’. Milburn has made clear that what he envisages won’t deliver in the next three years, which makes it impossible for Burnham to be able to get the savings he’s after in order to say he can get defence spending to reach 3 per cent of GDP by 2030.
