2007 Comprehensive Spending Review
Long-term challenges and opportunities for the UK - your views
On 19 July 2005 the Chief Secretary to the Treasury announced that the Government intends to launch a second Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) reporting in 2007, to identify what further investments and reforms are needed to equip the UK for the global challenges of the decade ahead.
A decade on from the first CSR, the 2007 CSR will represent a long-term and fundamental review of government expenditure. It will cover departmental allocations for 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11, with allocations for 2007-08 held to the agreed figures already announced at the 2004 Spending Review.
To lay the groundwork for the CSR, the Government is taking forward a programme of work involving:
- an examination of the key long-term trends and challenges that will shape the next decade - including demographic and socio-economic change, globalisation, climate and environmental change, global uncertainty and technological change;
- a national debate to build a shared understanding of how the UK and public services need to respond to these challenges (further details of the opportunities to participate in this debate will be set out in the coming months);
- detailed studies of key areas where cross-cutting, innovative policy responses are required to meet these long-term challenges;
- an ambitious and far-reaching value for money programme to release the resources needed to address the challenges, involving both further development of the efficiency areas developed in the Gershon review, and a set of zero-based reviews of departments’ baseline expenditure to assess its effectiveness in delivering the Government’s long-term objectives; and
- a more strategic approach to asset management and investment decisions, ensuring the UK is equipped with the infrastucture needed to support both public service delivery and the productivity and flexibility of the wider economy.
Further details on each of these strands of work can be found in Chapter 6 of Budget 2006 (see link below).
