The Geddes Axe: public spending by independent review

London - Wednesday 23rd June 2010

Grocers' Hall, Princes Street, London EC2R 8AD

This event is free to clients of Lombard Street Research who have a seminar subscription. Non subscribers are welcome to come for a fee. To make an enquiry please call 020 7382 5970.

Programme

10.30 a.m.      Registration and coffee

11.00 a.m.      Speeches followed by Q and A

12.45 p.m.      Lunch

Timings are approximate

Content

On the day after the Coalition Government’s first Budget, our guest of honour will be Professor Richard Roberts, Director of the Centre for Contemporary British History at the University of London.

Professor Roberts will open with an analysis of the Geddes Report of 1922, the most comprehensive and rigorous independent external review of public expenditure to date in the United Kingdom.  He will also review the two other cases of stringent spending cuts - balancing the budget in 1931, and the IMF bailout of 1976. This will include comparisons and lessons from these episodes for today.

Brian Reading will outline and analyse current public spending cut challenges facing the coalition government, with reference to the three key elements that must underpin them if they are to win any chance of acceptance and success: fairness, focus and effectiveness.   

Charles Dumas will focus on the now-global savings glut, and resulting government deficits, in a survey of world growth prospects and the peculiar continental crisis arising from Economic and Monetary Union.