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Video: Chief Secretary on Spending Review day

Our cameras followed the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander throughout Spending Review day, taking in a busy schedule of meetings, attending Parliament and giving media interviews. See the video highlighting the Chief Secretary's activities along with his reflections of Spending Review day by visiting our Youtube channel. Subtitles are available on the video and a transcript can be read below.

Transcript of video following Danny Alexander on Spending Review day

I’ve been up for quite a few hours and I’m sitting here in the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office just reading some notes before cabinet. It is going to be a very busy day. We’ve got Cabinet in a few moments where we’re briefing colleagues on the content of the Spending Review and then to the House of Commons where the Chancellor will make the Statement and then for me, a round for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening of media interviews explaining to the British people the decisions we’ve made, the choices we’ve made how we’re going about reducing the deficit which is causing such big problems for our economy.

It’s a very important day for the country and I think people want to genuinely want to know and understand the decisions we’ve made, the judgements we’ve made, why we’ve made those decisions and what the consequences are. So I think more than anything it’s a day of explanation – it’s not a day for having big political rows, it’s a day for setting out, in a very clear way the judgements that we’ve made and why it is that we think these judgements are the right ones to support prosperity for the future.

When we came into office we found a country on the brink of bankruptcy and we need to stabilise our public finances and we need to sort out the deficit if we are going to have a firm platform for growth and prosperity in the future. This means some very difficult decisions but they are decisions based on the principles of fairness, on the need to support long term economic growth and on fundamental reform of our public services so we get better value for the public money we do have left to spend.

Since we last met at half part seven this morning, George and I have briefed the Cabinet about the Spending Review…George delivered his Statement to the Commons and that went very well and I’ve been spending the rest of the day… endless round media interviews trying to explain the choices we’ve made in the Spending Review and explain why it is that it’s so necessary to be making the changes to public spending that we’re announcing today and just trying to give people at home who are of course genuinely interested to see what we’ve decided and concerned about the impact on them to try and give people a sense of why we’ve made the decisions that we have.

[extracts from media interviews]

Just now come back to the office and these are the settlement letters as they are called, the letters that go to Departments to tell them precisely the allocations that we have given to them that are described in the Spending Review document and that has to be done tonight. I’m off to do Channel Four News and Newsnight in a wee while.

I think today’s gone well in the sense that we have presented what we’ve decided, we’ve communicated a message which is a very difficult one in the sense that these are not changes that any of us would want to make, I didn’t come into politics to cut public spending but it is what needs to be done and I think we’ve managed to communicate that and explain to people some of the big choices we’ve made in terms of trying to prioritise education and health and investment in infrastructure over waste and central government expenditure and changes to the welfare system so I think we’ve explained that and obviously people will want to know more detail and Departments will be spelling that out over the coming weeks and months but in terms of trying get across to people some very, very difficult decisions that are going to have a real impact on people’s lives I think that we have started that process effectively.

My last engagement for the day is a live interview on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman at half past ten and then after that I get to go home and go to bed…quite rightly those encounters are testing ones because it’s quite right that journalists and the media should be really scrutinising what we’re doing and trying explain it effectively to their readers and viewers and I’m looking forward to having a chance to do that on BBC2 later.