Jeremy Hunt insists health budget is safe Health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who is convinced his department needs its protected status to handle growing demand. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, is confidently claiming the support of both David Cameron and Nick Clegg in his attempts to prevent other government departments raiding his protected budget in the spending review on 26 June. Cabinet ministers formally submitted their offer of cuts to the Treasury on Tuesday. The Treasury is looking for £11bn overall cuts for 2015-16, but the composition of such savings is up for grabs. Hunt has told colleagues there is no sign anyone in the Treasury or Downing Street is willing to see the already pressurised health budget raided in a way that breaks coalition commitments to allow its budget to rise by 1% a year. Hunt is convinced that his department - facing massive demographic-led costs pressure - needs its protected status to handle growing demand. On Tuesday Clegg once again insisted he will not allow the health department to be raided by the so-called unprotected departments such as defence. Clegg also tried to lower the political temperature, saying the review will not be as gory as the 2010 spending review. Vince Cable, the business secretary, a long-term opponent of ringfencing specific budgets, has accepted that the battle about ringfencing is now lost. But that is partly because the coalition is going to agree departmental totals covering only 2015-16, the first year after the next general election, and merely set out the overall speed with which spending and the deficit will be reduced up to 2017-18, so giving Whitehall a sense of the pace of the coming retrenchment. There will also be longer term numbers covering capital spending, so showing the planned split between capital and current spending for the parliament. In another innovation the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Liberal Democrat Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, are planning to set out overall numbers on how annually managed expenditure, especially welfare budgets, will be constrained. Such expenditure covers debt interest, pensions and welfare. The projected rise in debt interest is striking. It is forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility to increase from £28.4bn in 2003-04 to £62bn in 2017-18. This is an increase in real spending of 118% and would leave debt interest payments accounting for 4% more of total spending in 2017-18 than they did in 2003-04. This spending rise is inevitable. It is not yet clear what will be targeted within the welfare subset of annually managed expenditure. Osborne has said he will not constrain the automatic stabilisers, those parts of the budget due to rise automatically because of higher unemployment. But it is likely to be housing benefit paid to the employed, disability benefits and some pensioner tax credits. The aim is to find a system that sets out a five-year forecast for this subset of annually managed expenditure, and if it becomes clear it is rising too fast, ministers will have to respond. But there is agreement that for 2015-16, there will be no more welfare cuts. The battle to force through the annual 1% uprating in benefits for the next three years has exhausted the Lib Dem appetite for further cuts. Welfare is not going to come to the rescue of the cutters as it has from 2010, at least not in 2015-16. The difficulty is that both parties in the coalition are willing to target only a very small number of departments. If it were a Venn diagram, the interconnecting space would be tiny. The no-go areas are health, schools, defence equipment, overseas aid, working age welfare, debt interest payments and pensioners, including winter fuel allowance. There will be some areas where spending will increase, such as childcare and, possibly, the pupil premium, a subject on which both Lib Dems and Tories would like to see more focus. So the pressure on the unprotected departments is immense. The OBR shows unprotected departments will suffer a a huge 35% cumulative cut between 2011-12 and 2017-18, while the protected departments enjoy a 1% rise. Social security and tax credits rise by a cumulative 16% to 2017-18. Faced by these numbers, and the resistance to end the protections, the vulnerable spending ministries are trying a new approach. They are arguing the demarcation lines between departmental budgets are in reality much more porous than the apparently rigid lines set out in the Treasury red book. Indeed some of the divides are arbitrary. For instance, the line between social care (the responsibility of local government) and health is murky. The business department would quite like the Department for Education to take more responsibility for further education. Another idea is for the BBC World Service to come under the aid budget. The Treasury says it is happy to examine whether aid-related budgets fall correctly within Whitehall. The Treasury and the Department for International Development insist they will not allow any new agreement to breach the international definitions of aid set by the OECD, the body responsible for measuring aid. However, these definitions are not entirely watertight - for instance, concessional loans can be seen as aid under some definitions. Alexander believes these rows about definitions are something of a sideshow. He believes as much as £5bn of £11bn cuts can be found through efficiency savings, such as digital-by-default services and more efficient procurement, the kind of unglamorous, but effective work undertaken by Francis Maude in the Cabinet Office. Maude is also an enthusiast for services being merged at local level through community budgets. The Local Government Assocation says billions could be saved. One idea is to see police and fire services, or indeed ambulance services, merge. The model is the kind of work undertaken by the troubled families unit bringing together sometimes warring agencies. It is not too bad a model for Alexander himself as he sets out on the pockmarked road to the spending review.