Treasury pours cold water on FT suggestion that spending cuts might be delayed

By Tim Montgomerie

On the face of it, a significant story on the front of today's FT:

"The Treasury is working on plans to “reprofile” spending cuts next April, spreading the pain of deficit reduction more evenly over the next few years, senior Whitehall officials have told the Financial Times. Confronted with the difficulties of quickly cutting spending – including financial penalties for breaking contracts and redundancy costs – ministers have been forced to consider delaying some of the big savings until later in this parliament."

If true this would be very big news and confirm the difficulty of delivering the scale of spending cuts promised by George Osborne.

The Treasury has poured cold water on the story, however.

Although they won't rule out a modest "reprofiling" of spending plans a senior aide to the Chancellor has told me that the government is not currently looking at doing so.