The real cost of the Tories plans revealed

Today we set out some of the work we’ve been doing over the Christmas break, putting a price-tag on Mr Cameron’s effort to be all things to all people.

It’s an extraordinary picture.

Its looks as if there is an incredible £34 billion gap in what the Tories are saying they want to do – and the tax rises and spending cuts they have proposed to pay for them. And this is before they turn their minds to reducing the deficit.

How did the Tories get themselves in this position? It looks as if its as simple as Mr Osborne failing to keep track of all the promises he and David Cameron have been making. In short, for two years, David Cameron has gone round the country telling people whatever he thinks they want to hear. Every audience gets told whatever they want You want tax cuts, here they are. You want a faster cut in the deficit, we’ll do that too. You want more spending, here it is. Lots of it. You want to reverse what Labour’s doing, we can do that too. That’s their message.

But no one has been keeping tabs of all their promises – certainly not George Osborne.

Until today. For the first time, we have brought all the Tory promises together to present the bill.

The Tories have made over £45bn of pledges, but can barely explain how they can pay for a quarter of this. This leaves them with a credibility gap of £34bn. They have made tax promises worth £21bn per year by the end of the Parliament, including: • £4.1bn for removing basic rate income tax from savings • £4.9bn for married couples allowances, where the highest earners get the most benefit • £1.5bn for Inheritance tax cuts focused on 3000 estates.

They have also said they have a ‘queue’ of planned tax rises that they would reverse. These amount to £13.3 billion per year by the end of the next Parliament. These include measures to reduce the deficit, such as the national insurance rise, the new 50p top rate and restrictions on pension tax relief for the very highest earners. They have also made over £11.1 billion of spending commitments. Such as 45,000 extra rooms for the NHS, 5000 more prison places and 3 more infantry battalions.

And this doesn’t include many potentially expensive promises – like tax credits for grandparents or a ‘National Citizen’s Service’ – which are just too vague to cost. We have included Tory figures for efficiencies and cuts where they are credible and genuinely additional to anything the government is already doing.

Even in the most generous scenario for the Conservatives, all these pledges would yield annual savings of £6.6 billion.

And finally, their tax rises – on increasing the cost of business investment and putting a levy on non-doms from day one, for example – yield them a further £5.1 bn.

Taken all together this leaves a credibility gap of £34bn in their plans.

By the way, we’ve tried to be as generous as possible to the Tories. Generous to a fault you might say. We have given the Tories the benefit of the doubt and used their estimates except where there are clearly more recent or more credible numbers available. The costings are based on publicly available sources such as Parliamentary Questions or the Pre-Budget Report. In some cases, later costings credit the Tories with additional revenues or savings. In others costings suggest the Tories have over-estimated revenues or under-estimated costs, leaving them with a substantial credibility gap.

Now, already this morning, Mr Cameron has backed off some of the commitments we listed. Fine. We’ve been trying to get the Tories to clarify for 18 months whether their promises are real or empty. We just want him to be straight with the British public.