The start of renegotiation of the major staff contracts in the NHS – for consultants, GPs and the rest of the staff
These contracts were agreed during the years of plenty and are out of line with a decade of austerity. Mark Britnell, the former head of commissioning at the Department of Health, has said that the NHS does not have time to renegotiate the contracts and can sweat greater productivity out of the existing ones. But it has to be done so why wait? And does a renegotiation really have to take five years, as it did last time? Best of all would be if hospital trusts decide to leave the framework of national bargaining altogether, following the example of the Southend Foundation Trust.

Greater means testing of benefits
The Conservative Party has said that it will impose a minimal extra amount of means testing (specifically by withdrawing the Child Trust Fund from better off families and abolishing in-work benefits for families earning over £50,000). But these changes will save only hundreds of millions of pounds when billions of savings are needed from the benefits budget. Research by think tank Reform has found that a quarter of benefits are paid to individuals and families on middle and high incomes.

New near-compulsory pensions to be reviewed
The new near-compulsory personal pensions to be reviewed following FSA Chairman Adair Turner’s recommendations constitute another major policy that was agreed in the good times and now looks uncertain. Personal accounts have already been delayed but this has not allayed fears that many people will be worse off by paying into these accounts due to levels of benefits.

Outsourcing of civil service functions
Central government has yet to reap the benefits from outsourcing that local government has enjoyed. Both main parties are now impatient with the performance of the civil service and interested in ideas to make the service more accountable and more aware of value for money. New ideas for outsourcing – and also asset sales – will follow.

Cap on tuition fees to rise
Lord Browne of Madingley’s review of higher education tuition fees will inevitably find that the cap on tuition fees should rise. It makes sense on economic and equity grounds because the schools system produces better outcomes for children from better off families, and because taxpayer support for higher education is very regressive. It is consistent with the fact that the government has felt able to talk about cuts in taxpayer support for higher education with greater confidence than in any other sector.

The number of teaching assistants will fall
In 1999 there were 60,600 teaching assistants in England. In 2009 there were 183,700. This explosive growth, the biggest of any major public sector employment category, is partly due to a workforce agreement with teachers (agreed in 2003) that provided guaranteed time out of the classroom for teachers. Productivity has inevitably fallen. The Treasury is reviewing the use of teaching assistants as part of its current Public Value Programme on public sector productivity.