By Ed Holmes. Edited by Hiba Sameen & Dr Andrew Lilico.

The Coalition government plans to cut departmental budgets by 25% by 2014/15.  This major report considers how to achieve this for six key departments: Education, Business, Innovation and Skills, Communities and Local Government, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and Energy and Climate Change.

For these, we examine the status, feasibility and merit for spending reduction for each programme and consider alternatives means of provision, categorising each new cut as “intrinsically desirable”, “plausible” or “unpalatable”.