§ Mr. Ioan Evansasked the Prime Minister if she will make a. statement on 175W Government proposals for expenditure on the disabled, in the light of the statement by the Minister with special responsibility for the disabled that figures in the public expenditure White Paper do not reflect Government policy.
§ The Prime MinisterThe Government's prime objectives are to reduce inflation and to secure an improvement in the country's economic performance, on which the future of the social services depends. These require a reduction in public spending and the Government are therefore committed to achieving the overall targets for local and central Government spending in 1980–81 set out in their expenditure plans (Cmnd. 7841), as instanced by the recent request to local authorities to revise their budgets for this year. Within this lower level there are no specific Government plans to cut services for the disabled: it is for spending Departments and authorities to determine priorities within the main totals. Thus paragraph 43 of the White Paper, which was what my right hon. Friend primarily had in mind, states that the breakdown shown for local authority services is tentative and that it is for individual authorities—who have been asked to protect services for the most vulnerable as far as possible—to decide the eventual distribution between services.