TORY ECONOMIC FAILURE

David Cameron and George Osborne have presided over the slowest recovery in 100 years.

In March the Office for Budget Responsibility halved the growth forecast for this year and downgraded it for next year too.

Since George Osborne’s Spending Review in 2010, the UK economy has grown by just 1.1% compared to the 6% forecast at the time.

Other countries are doing better. The UK economy is now 2.6 per cent below its pre-crisis peak, while the USA is 3.2 per cent above.

Unemployment is rising again – up 15,000 on the quarter and higher than at the General Election. Almost a million young people are unemployed.

There are 464,000 people who have been unemployed for more than two years – the highest ever figure since May 1997.

With the economy flatlining and inflation high, real wages have fallen since this Government came to office meaning people are worse off.

People will be worse off in 2015 than when this government came to office. Real wages are set to fall by 2.4 per cent over the Parliament.

And that’s before the impact of higher VAT and cuts to things like tax credits are taken into account. IFS figures show that families are an average of £891 worse off in this financial year because of tax rises and cuts to tax credits and benefits introduced since 2010.

Lack of growth has meant more borrowing to pay for the costs of economic failure.

Borrowing is now forecast to be £245 billion more than planned at the time of the spending review – excluding the one off transfers of the Royal Mail Pension Fund and Asset Purchase Facility.

The Government will not “balance the books” by 2015 as David Cameron promised. National debt as a percentage of GDP is not now forecast to start falling until 2017/18 – further breaking one of the Government’s fiscal rules.