Having been so long trailed, last week’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) leaves commercial law firms largely where they were before Chancellor George Osborne detailed the deepest public spending cuts since World War II.
That is because the coalition Government had already spelled out its broad fiscal position in June’s emergency Budget – to eliminate the structural deficit over the life of this Parliament. Since then, the Con/Lib coalition has gone out of its way to ram home the austerity message, understandably on the basis that it’s best to get this out the way while the public will still blame the former administration.
