Britain faces an "age of austerity" as the new coalition government readies aggressive cuts in public spending to slash the deficit, Treasury minister David Laws told the Financial Times yesterday.

Laws, chief secretary to the Treasury in Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition, will outline plans tomorrow to make £6 billion of cuts in the current 2010/2011 year.

"We are moving from an age of plenty to an age of austerity in public finances," Laws told the FT in his first newspaper interview since taking office on May 12.

"We will make that austerity as progressive as we can, by protecting the things and the people who need protecting."

Laws, who is a Liberal Democrat, added he was "mentally prepared for getting a lot of representations from angry people" when the cuts are made.

Cameron, whose Conservatives are in an unlikely alliance with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Lib Dems, has made a key priority of tackling the deficit amid mounting concern about soaring debt levels in the eurozone.

Britain's public finances have been ravaged by enormously expensive banking-sector bail-outs, and a record-length recession that has slashed taxation revenues and ramped up expenditure.

In a rare piece of good news, revised data showed last Friday that the deficit hit £156.1 billion in 2009/2010, or 11.1 per cent of GDP. That was lower than the previous estimate of £163.4 billion pounds - but was still a record.

"I haven't quite worked out whether this is a dream or a nightmare," Laws told the FT yesterday, adding that the government was facing a choice between "the unpalatable and the disastrous" in its bid to balance the books.

Finance minister George Osborne, who is a Conservative, will meanwhile unveil an emergency budget on June 22.

"The budget is going to have to set out, in a really credible and decisive and aggressive way, the action that we're going to have to take to reduce the deficit," Laws said.