Chancellor's axe falls on Oxfordshire

With schools, the local NHS and the county’s science community having been spared in Chancellor George Osborne’s public spending review, higher education and local government will be bearing much of the pain over the next four years.

Oxford’s two universities stand to lose their teaching funding, except for maths and science subjects, and face having to significantly hike student tuition fees just to ‘stand still’.

Local councils have been told that they can expect cuts of at least 28 per cent in funding over the four years, raising the spectre of hundreds of redundancies.

Oxfordshire County Council had already warned that job losses could reach 1,000, with cuts of £203m planned up to 2015.

Tory county council leader Keith Mitchell welcomed the protection for the schools budget, science funding and investment in green technology. But he said the picture “remained unclear” in other areas.

He said: “Our worries are what’s left. It seems there is money for transport, but whether it comes here, we don’t know. It looks like there's money for social care, but the devil is in the detail.

“We do not have any real answers as yet.”

Oxford City Council’s deputy leader, Ed Turner, said the outlook for Oxford was “bleak”.

The Labour councillor said cuts to funding for social housing, coupled with reductions in housing benefit and increases in social rents would hit the city hard.

He added: “It is very bad news. It will be difficult to get away without reductions in front-line services and some job losses.”

The number of police officers is likely to fall in the county.

The chief constable of Thames Valley Police, Sara Thornton, said: “I have always felt that a cut of more than ten per cent in police budgets will be very difficult and could lead to noticeable reductions in service.

“The review has announced a 16 per cent total cut over the next four years.

“We, won’t find out our actual central police grant for the coming years until December, so I am unable to speculate on how many roles may go and whether there will be any redundancies or cuts to front-line services at this stage.

“The savings will come from a number of different schemes. We are going to work more closely with our colleagues in Hampshire.

Oxford University warned the cuts in grant would wipe away the benefit of seeing the cap on tuition fees raised, with the university having to depend on benefactors to maintain its position as a leading international university.

Spokesman Ruth Collier, said: “Proposals to protect research funding for science are a positive development. The same cannot be said for the planned cuts to teaching grants, which represent a setback for the sector.

“Already, funds that would otherwise be spent on research, infrastructure and postgraduate support at Oxford are being diverted to support the university’s world-class undergraduate tutorial system. We do not believe this is sustainable in the long term.

“Oxford is fortunate to have the generous support of many benefactors across the world and it is clear that we will need to look to them, more than ever before, to help maintain Oxford’s international position in both research and teaching. Without them that position will be increasingly at risk — an outcome that is not in the university’s or the national interest.”

But the Government was credited with listening to scientists, who had been bracing themselves for hundreds of job losses.

John Womersley, of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), had warned that the Government’s 25 per cent cuts would mean mothballing a major facility such as the Diamond Light Source or Isis Neutron Source at Harwell, which together employ about 800 people.

But months of campaigning appeared to have paid off when it was revealed that the science budget would be frozen for four years.

And the Chancellor told MPs that the multi-million pound Diamond Light synchrotron facility, used to help research in everything from healthcare to archaeology, would be spared the axe.