Osborne’s cuts: where will the axe fall?

George Osborne has vowed to slash benefits, while David Cameron has pledged to keep raising pensions. Emily Hohler reports.

There may not be a general election until May 2015, but the recent "salvos" from David Cameron and George Osborne are typical of the start of an election year, says Steve Richards in The Independent.

The essence of their pitch is that a lot has been done towards tackling the deficit, but there is still a long way to go. So we'll be getting good and bad news in 2014. The "good news" is that Cameron confirmed the triple lock' on pensions; the bad news is that Osborne is insisting that £25bn of cuts are required after 2015, £12bn of which will come from welfare.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.