Mystery of the Missing Millions

Yesterday's Newsround at 5pm began with an attempt to explain the coalition government's comprehensive spending review.

Sonali: None of us like being told we're gonna have less cash to spend. It's not exactly fun having to be careful about how many texts you're sending out, or how many magazines you buy.

Ricky: But today everyone in the UK was told the Government's going to cut the whole country's spending money by a lot - over 130 billion pounds in the next four years.

Sonali: It is a very big deal because they spend that cash on things like hospitals, the police, the army, our roads, your schools ... the list goes on. Now many of those everyday things will have to run on far less money.

Ricky: So, why is the country suddenly so short of cash in the first place? Well here's money boffin, Evan Davis - you might recognise him from Dragons' Den - with the 'Mystery of the Missing Millions' to explain.

We then saw Evan's explanation - the clip on this webpage. If the Last Updated info on the page is "Wednesday October 20 2010 15:49 GMT" then just beneath the clip it may say "The government has announced big plans to cut the whole country's spending money by a staggering £130 BILLION over the next four years."

Apparently Evan was delighted with the production job on his video.

What is interesting here is that almost everyone believes that the spending cuts will amount to £81 billion over four years, but Newsround claims that it's £130 billion. So who's right? This seems suitable for Newsround Blog to investigate, and I emailed the BBC about it this morning.