LABOUR and the Conservatives are engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” about public spending after the election, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said.

This week’s budget was not transparent about the significant cuts to public spending necessary to ensure the government meets its fiscal rule to have debt falling in five years’ time, IFS director Paul Johnson warned.

Ministers set out plans involving cutting spending on unprotected departments — including courts, prisons and local councils — by around £20 billion, cutting public investment by £18bn a year in real terms.

“Maybe that is possible, but keeping to these plans would require some staggeringly hard choices which the government has not been willing to lay out,” Mr Johnson said.

“Indeed, we heard yesterday that the next spending review, in which these choices will have to be announced, will rather conveniently not happen until after the election.

“One only has to look at the scale of NHS waiting lists, the number of local authorities at or near bankruptcy, the backlogs in the justice system, the long-term cuts to university funding and the struggles of the social care system to wonder where these cuts will really, credibly come from.

“Government and opposition are joining in a conspiracy of silence in not acknowledging the scale of the choices and trade-offs that will face us after the election.

“They — and we — could be in for a rude awakening when those choices become unavoidable.”

He warned that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s stated ambitions to abolish employees’ National Insurance contributions and increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP without further detail on how they would be funded were “unlikely.”

Speaking to broadcasters today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declined to explain how he would fund an abolition of National Insurance.

Analysis by the Resolution Foundation think tank found that pensioners are the big losers from Mr Hunt’s Budget amid falling living standards and stagnating growth.