The 2015 Budget will bring UK public spending down to US levels by 2018-19, research by the University's Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby reveals.
Data gathered by the IMF before the June election showed that public spending in the UK would fall close to US levels by 2018.
But Professor Taylor-Gooby, of the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, has found that cuts to welfare benefits and spending by government departments announced in the Budget are sufficient to take it below this level and keep it there.
Professor Taylor-Gooby said: ‘We have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar levels of state spending in this country. ‘That was when we had many fewer old age pensioners, we had more council housing and didn’t spend so much on rent benefits and the health service cost a lot less to run.
‘A shift to US levels of public spending is a decisive move away from the welfare state and towards the creation of a more unequal society where opportunities depend more on luck and family background.’
The projections are based on the IMF World Economic Outlook Database, April 2015 updated to UK July 2015 budget.