The first job for new transport secretary Philip Hammond is to make £683 million of cuts at the Department for Transport as the government takes a hatchet to the budget deficit. Chancellor George Osborne has announced a total of £6.2 billion in cuts.
Precisely which transport programmes are being cut is yet to be revealed, but the following savings have been identified across the whole government.
• £1.15bn in discretionary areas like consultancy and travel costs
• £95m through savings in IT spending
• £1.7bn from delaying and stopping contracts and projects, including immediate negotiations to achieve cost reductions from the major suppliers to government
• £170m from reductions in property costs
• at least £120m from a recruitment freeze across the civil service for the rest of 2010-11
• £600m from cutting the cost of quangos
• £520m by reducing other lower value spend.
