The Liberal Democrats have reacted to the Spending Review.
Daisy Cooper has warned that Rachel Reeves may have left a black hole for social care funding. This is based on local government having their funding cut by 1.4% during the period of the review. Councils have a statutory duty to provide social care and this does not help them.
This spending review was a missed opportunity to repair the damage done by the Conservatives and finally deliver on the promise of change.
Behind the smoke and mirrors is a potential blackhole for social care as local government budgets remain at breaking point. Putting more money into the NHS without fixing social care is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
The Chancellor must also raise her ambition for the country and boost growth through a much closer trade deal with the EU. That’s the best way to improve people’s living standards and unlock billions of pounds more for our public services.
Welsh Lib Dem MP David Chadwick was distinctly unimpressed with Labour’s plans to invest in Welsh rail:
Labour’s contempt for Wales just gets worse and worse.
The indefensible decision to spread this measly amount of rail funding over 10 years not only robs Wales of what it is owed for past projects, but also guarantees that we will continue to fall behind in infrastructure spending, as major transport projects in England get the green light.
Labour clearly has no interest in growing the Welsh economy or giving us the tools we need to thrive and attract investment into our country.
Tim Farron found that Labour had done what nobody should do – upset the people who grow your food by cutting their budget.
I’m more than disappointed to see the Government once again put farmers and rural communities at the back of the Treasury queue.
With the Chancellor barely paying lip service to farmers in her statement to Parliament today, it’s clear the farming industry has been relegated in Reeves’ list of sectors to rescue. All this on top of the Government’s shameful family farm tax that’s ringing the death knell for farming communities across the country.
Reeves’ move today is just wrong. Our farmers need more investment, not less – including a cast-iron guarantee to maintain the nature-friendly farming funds rather than the cuts the Chancellor has introduced today.
Lisa Smart found that the Government is passing on Police costs to Council Tax payers:
The Government is relying on a hidden council tax bombshell to fund their half-hearted rise in police funding as they pass the buck to local families.
After frontline policing was neglected for years under the Conservatives, local communities deserve better than this sleight of hand.
The Government must put more bobbies on the beat, with the proper funding to make it happen. Liberal Democrats will keep pushing for the proper neighbourhood policing our communities deserve.
We will update this page throughout the day as more reactions come in.
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7 Comments
” a potential blackhole for social care”. You wouldn’t want to put any money near that, or it would vanish at the speed of light and never be seen again.
@Jenny, you do raise an interesting point. If you concerned about economic benefit of the monies being spent, social care is a difficult one to quantify. Not saying it doesn’t have an impact, but given a choice between social care or bin collection, most people will opt for the latter, in part because it is one of the few “visible” services a council provides.
Sorry, it was meant to be a comment about using metaphors that make no sense. A financial black hole, if it were anything like a physical one, would merely get bigger if you put any money within its notional event horizon. So the statement actually says adding money to social care does nothing. I’m fairly sure that’s not what she meant.
If I were a councillor on a council with statutory care responsibilities, presumably I would have no choice but to vote for money for social care rather than bin collections, whatever my preferences. Which doesn’t seem very democratic.
Jenny, I’m not really sure what you mean, but as someone who was a Cabinet member for social care I can tell you that people in care do have feelings and needs, as do their families. Meeting those needs as best we can is a moral duty to a common humanity. But as far as I know I have never met a dustbin that was confused, disabled or in pain.
It makes no sense to create a situation where it becomes impossible or expensive to recruit care workers and then complain when social care becomes more expensive. Care worker immigration has been stopped (presumably to see off Reform), so it’s no longer possible to recruit from abroad, employee NI contributions increased. All this makes the workforce more expensive or absent.
The Reform anti immigrant rhetoric never seems to care that these people are mostly working in the NHS, care homes, picking crops, or studying at our universities and paying high fees to do so.
If we are to provide a humane social care system, it will need to be paid for, one way or another. Increased income tax, alignment of CGT, a sensible LVT replacing council tax? It’s easy to want increased spending, not so easy to work out how to fund it.
Might the two articles below be interesting/relevant/useful?
The socio-economic data, such as the use of food-banks etc., ever increasingly shows, our citizens and their children were better off with a reasonably balanced, mixed economy.
Might the L. D. leadership do our country and itself a favour by advocating and striving for a dynamic mixed market economy?
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/06/11/reeves-spending-review-contemporaneous-notes/
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/06/11/its-austerity-from-reeves/
Here is another detailed review of the recent spending review:
https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/