Badenoch urges Healey to avoid ‘fictional cuts’ 

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has urged Chancellor John Healey to focus on urgently cutting spending and avoid making “fictional cuts” at the end of parliament. In a speech in London on Tuesday, Badenoch will warn that Labour’s deficit reduction plans rely on “huge cuts to the public sector in the final year of the spending period” that ministers may never have to deliver because an election is likely to come first. Spending growth in real terms is set to slow at the end of the forecast period following a faster rise in the early years of the Labour government, leading economists to warn that plans to ease spending were based on ambitious assumptions. “Fictional cuts are not going to cut it. Investors simply aren’t buying it,” she is expected to say, pointing to analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies stating that higher inflation could erode the value of spending and leave a £35bn black hole in budgets. The speech comes at a pressing time for the opposition leader as