Business department promotes Philip Rutnam, a former Treasury mandarin, as its acting permanent secretary partly to ease the strain with George Osborne

Telegraph View George Osborne's hand will be strengthened by the Treasury's demonstration that spending cuts begin at home

The Treasury will be one of the first government departments to implement cutbacks amid plans by George Osborne to reduce staff numbers by a quarter.

George Osborne this week starts the final phase of Whitehall's biggest public spending purge in a generation, as he convenes the "star chamber" to begin signing off cuts of between 25-40 per cent for most departments

George Osborne is planning to cut staff numbers at the Treasury by about one-quarter and scale back his department's role as he attempts to lead by example in the search for spending cuts across Whitehall

Amid all the feverish commotion about cuts, it's easy to forget that it took the Tories until November 2008 to ditch Labour's spending plans - and, indeed, that it was barely a year ago when George Osborne first mentioned the c-word in public. Even David Cameron admits that this delay was his biggest mistake. It weakened his party's claim to foresight, and gave them less time to emb...

by Ed Balls INTRODUCTION I am very grateful to Bloomberg for giving me the opportunity to come here this morning to respond to the bullish speech given from this same platform by George Osborne 10 days ago. That speech is the clearest articulation of the Cameron-Clegg Coalition strategy for this parliament. In it, their Chancellor repeated his claim that

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson reveals the war being waged against schools reform, and hears Mark Hoban become the first victim of New Labour’s landmines. James Forsyth says the coalition has five lessons to learn, and reports on the truce between IDS and George Osborne. Peter Hoskin rounds up the double dip predictions, and explains how ...

In a keynote speech today (Friday) Ed Balls will say Labour needs to urgently make the case for a credible economic alternative to the coalition’s "deflationary cuts" which risk a double-dip recession. In his speech – which is being held at Bloomberg, where ten days ago George Osborne accused Labour of being ‘deficit deniers’ – Ed Balls will accuse David Cameron and G...

Britain’s leading independent tax experts today flatly rejected the coalition government’s claims to have shielded poor families from five years of austerity when they described George Osborne’s emergency budget as “clearly regressive”. In a direct challenge to Treasury claims that the package of spending cuts and tax increases announced in June was