Are public finances as bad as Labour claim and is a tough budget necessary?

Both main parties disagree on the state of the economic outlook for the UK.

Transcript

00:00But when I arrived at the Treasury on the very first day,

00:03I was alerted by officials that this was not how much

00:05the previous government expected to spend this year.

00:08It wasn't even close.

00:11In fact, the total pressures on these budgets across a range of areas

00:14was an additional £35 billion.

00:17You don't need to win an election to find out the state of public finances

00:21as we've got the OBR now.

00:23Paul Johnson of the IFS says the state of public finances

00:27were apparent pre-election to anyone who cared to look,

00:32which is why he and other independent figures say

00:34her argument is not credible and won't wash.

00:38There are sort of big issues and of course these issues

00:40were sort of known before the election.

00:42They would have been sort of in possession of sort of information

00:44sort of from the Office of Budget Responsibility

00:46or saying that even the sort of the cuts that were sort of baked in,

00:49which the sort of the Labour Party said that they were going to sort of adhere to,

00:52was going to cause or were going to cause problems.

00:54But they claimed that of course the sort of the problems

00:56were even sort of more embedded and deeper than they previously thought.