Liz Truss has been accused of making “ludicrous” claims as she pledged to cut civil service pay and cut spending to claw back £11bn a year in a “war on Whitehall waste” if becomes prime minister.
But the Tory leadership hopeful’s campaign, which received a new boost on Monday with the backing of Penny Mordaunt, was forced to redo some of its sums just hours after he published a series of proposals to reduce the cost of the public function.
These included paying staff outside London less and cutting annual leave. Truss also promised to “tackle left-wing groupthink in government” and scrap diversity and inclusion jobs, saying they “distract from delivering on the priorities of the British people”.
“As Prime Minister, I will lead a leaner, more efficient and more focused Whitehall that prioritizes the things that really matter to people and focuses on frontline services,” he said. “There is too much bureaucracy and outdated groupthink in Whitehall.”
Unions and policy experts condemned the plans as unworkable and said Truss had grossly overstated the potential savings, which she said amounted to £11 billion a year.
The most significant element of the plan is the introduction of regional pay boards, which he said will “adjust pay to the cost of living where civil servants actually work”. It claimed this would save up to £8.8 billion.
Experts questioned whether the savings were feasible. Alex Thomas, director of programs at the Institute for Government, said: “If you’re just talking about civil servants, that’s ridiculous; it doesn’t add up at all. All [annual] The civil service pay bill is around £9 billion.
He suggested that regional pay boards could be a reasonable plan, but would only deliver anything like the savings put forward by Truss if they were applied to the whole of the public sector, including the NHS, schools and local government, which would likely involve a long negotiation process.
“It’s not a bad thing for the public sector to adjust its pay scales to the part of the country it operates in. But you only get to those kinds of numbers if you’re talking about a doctor, a nurse or a school administrator. , which already he works outside London, earning a lower salary,” he said.
The £8.8bn savings policy echoes a Taxpayers’ Alliance report published at the weekend, but the paper said it could be achieved through regional pay bargaining across the public sector of about 5.7 million people.
Government statistics show there are 478,090 civil servants with an average salary of £30,110. Boris Johnson had already pledged to cut a fifth of the civil service, or around 90,000 jobs.
Truss’ team claimed that moving civil servants out of London would save £557m a year by avoiding the need to pay them special weighting to work in the capital. However, they overestimated the savings by around £400m and were forced to correct it to £153m on Monday afternoon.
Addressing Truss’s suggestion that civil servants’ salaries outside London can distort the labor market if they are higher than the local rate, Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union, compared it to the approach of P&O Ferries, which was criticized for leading to the decline. remuneration and staff conditions.
“Instead of taking a page out of the P&O Ferries playbook, Liz Truss should focus on ensuring the civil service has the right people with the right skills to deliver high quality public services and meet the challenges in which the government is facing at the moment, including recovering from Covid delays and the new war in continental Europe,” he said.
Other aspects of Truss’s plan include saving £2bn by cutting civil servants’ annual holiday allowance by two days. He also said he would bar civil service union representatives from using taxpayer-funded “facility time” to plan a strike.
Truss’ team said this would save up to £137m a year, but unions insist there are already firm restrictions on how facility time can be used. Oliver Dowden, then a Cabinet Office minister, told MPs in 2019 that facility time accounted for 0.06% of the public sector wage bill and the government was already reducing it.
Truss also announced he would stop a proposed ban on ‘buy one get one free’ offers on junk food, in an interview with the Daily Mail where he attacked ‘state nanny fees’.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said Truss was “declaring war on herself with her fantasy recipe to lower the bar”. He said the Conservative government had overseen “epic waste”, including during the pandemic.
“Their ‘tailored’ payment plans would reduce the pay of northerners, worsening the divide that already exists. This out-of-touch government’s commitment to leveling up is dead.
“Now Liz Truss is promising more cuts that will only worsen the backlogs we already have at courts, airports and GPs, leaving people waiting for passports, driving licenses and vital appointments.”
In his final message to Tory members as the ballot papers were published, Truss promised to “be bold” and “work tirelessly to deliver on our promises” to win the next election, which he said would be in 2024.
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In a final blow to Rishi Sunak, his leadership rival, he said: “We cannot continue to have the same business, and I have a bold plan to get our economy back on track.”