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Britain is facing public spending cuts on a scale unseen for a generation whoever wins the General Election, an influential think-tank warned, as it accused the main parties of failing to come clean with voters.
In a scathing report, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the public were being denied an "informed choice" because none of the parties had been prepared to set out their plans for tackling the record £163 billion deficit.
IFS director Robert Chote said that Labour, as the party of government, was "primarily" to blame because it had refused to carry out a spending review ahead of the election on May 6.
However he was also critical of the Conservative plans to start spending cuts this year when the recovery remained "fragile", even though it would make little overall difference to the long-term outlook for the public finances.
All parties, he suggested, were being "overambitious" in their claims to be able to cut spending and warned that whoever formed the next government would have to rely far more on tax increases than so far admitted.
The failure of any of the main parties to come forward with significant cuts to welfare payments meant that they would have to cut deep into public services, he added.
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"Over the four years starting next year, Labour and the Liberal Democrats would need to deliver the deepest sustained cuts to spending on public services since the late 1970s," he said.
"While, starting this year, the Conservatives would need to deliver cuts to spending on public services that have not been delivered over any five-year period since the Second World War."
The report was met by a slew of claims and counter-claims among the parties, with Labour insisting they had a plan in place to halve the deficit, the Tories claiming taxes would have to rise faster under Labour and the Lib Dems, and the Lib Dems arguing that the Tories could not afford their promised national insurance (NI) cut.
Launching the IFS analysis, Mr Chote said none of the parties had come "anywhere close" to identifying the savings they needed, with the Lib Dems having come up with about a quarter, the Tories less than a fifth, and Labour an eighth. "For the voters to be able to make an informed choice in this election, the parties need to explain clearly how they would go about achieving it. Unfortunately, they have not," he said.
