LABOUR and the Conservatives are engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” about public spending after the election, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said.

This week’s budget was not transparent about the significant cuts to public spending necessary to ensure the government meets its fiscal rule to have debt falling in five years’ time, IFS director Paul Johnson warned.

Ministers set out plans involving cutting spending on unprotected departments — including courts, prisons and local councils — by around £20 billion, cutting public investment by £18bn a year in real terms.

“Maybe that is possible, but keeping to these plans would require some staggeringly hard choices which the government has not been willing to lay out,” Mr Johnson said.

“Indeed, we heard yesterday that the next spending review, in which these choices will have to be announced, will rather conveniently not happen until after the election.

“One only has to look at the scale of NHS waiting lists, the number of local authorities at or near bankruptcy, the backlogs in the justice system, the long-term cuts to university funding and the struggles of the social care system to wonder where these cuts will really, credibly come from.

“Government and opposition are joining in a conspiracy of silence in not acknowledging the scale of the choices and trade-offs that will face us after the election.

“They — and we — could be in for a rude awakening when those choices become unavoidable.”

He warned that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s stated ambitions to abolish employees’ National Insurance contributions and increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP without further detail on how they would be funded were “unlikely.”

Speaking to broadcasters today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declined to explain how he would fund an abolition of National Insurance.

Analysis by the Resolution Foundation think tank found that pensioners are the big losers from Mr Hunt’s Budget amid falling living standards and stagnating growth.

Chief executive Torsten Bell said that it has been a “frenetic few years” for tax policy, with several rises and cuts in tax, middle earners coming out on top.

“The biggest group of losers are pensioners, who face an £8bn collective hit,” he added, with policy changes over this Parliament reinforcing “the sense that the government has reversed course from the approach that dominated during the 2010s.”

National Pensioner’s Convention general secretary Jan Shortt said: “This pre-election Budget just continues a fiscal pattern that continues to push millions of todays and tomorrow’s older people into poverty.

“There was nothing in Chancellor Jeremy’s Hunt Spring Budget for older people – just as there was nothing in his last Budget.

“The cut in National Insurance doesn’t help today’s retired people because they don’t pay it. However, this cut in NI will badly affect pensioners of the future – it means less money going into the state pension pot, reducing what is available to the next generation of retirees.

“The freeze on tax thresholds together with the pension rises will also see millions more pensioners – many with small additional occupational incomes, being forced to pay tax for the first time. So, in effect, what they gain in a pension rise, will be lost to taxation. Indeed, this freeze on tax thresholds is of little use to everyone except the wealthy."