George Osborne's Spending Review - winning and losing departments

Next week's Spending Review will set the spending limits of each government department up to the next General Election in 2020. Prior to 1998. departments used to set their budgets on an annual basis, but that was changed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown who wanted departments to take a longer term view - he introduced three-yearly budgets. Each department is asked to split their budget into two categories - resource spending (the cost of policies, administration and departmental-specific programmes) and capital spending (the cost of buildings, roads and so on).