Liz Truss has abandoned a flagship policy to slash £8.8 billion from public sector pay after senior Conservatives warned that the plans would leave nurses, police officers and teachers poorer. The Tory leadership candidate was accused of 'levelling down' the nation and has now abandoned plans to pay workers in cheaper regions less than their counterparts in London and the South East.
Conservative Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, who is backing Rishi Sunak against Ms Truss to be the next Tory leader and Prime Minister, said he had been left “actually speechless” by the foreign secretary's pitch to party members choosing the next prime minister. Mr Houchen told BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme that the “horrifically bad” policy “could be Liz’s dementia tax moment”, in a comparison to Theresa May’s scrapped policy that was blamed for her poor electoral performance in 2017.
Ms Truss, widely seen as the frontrunner to take over in No 10, had announced the move on Monday night as part of a “war on Whitehall waste” to make savings from the Civil Service. But today, a spokeswoman for Ms Truss’s campaign claimed there had been “wilful misrepresentation” of the proposal amid growing blue-on-blue attacks. She made clear they would be dropping it and instead maintaining current levels of pay.
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Speaking after the u-turn, Ms Truss said people were “unnecessarily worried” about the now-abandoned plans for regional pay boards. She told the BBC in Dorset: “I’m afraid that my policy on this has been misrepresented. I never had any intention of changing the terms and conditions of teachers and nurses. But what I want to be clear about is I will not be going ahead with the regional pay boards. That is no longer my policy.”
In response to the suggestion it was an error of judgment, she said: “I’m being absolutely honest, I’m concerned that people were worried – unnecessarily worried – about my policies and therefore I’m being clear that the regional pay boards will not go ahead.”
Unions, Tory opponents and Labour had all lined up to condemn the proposals. The Institute for Government’s Alex Thomas said the scale of the savings promised by Ms Truss meant “this isn’t mandarins moving from London, it’s nurse, teacher pay being adjusted down”. Meanwhile, the Sunak campaign had argued that the original plan would slash the pay of nearly six million public sector workers, with nurses, police and armed forces members facing £1,500 of cuts.
Announcing the u-turn, Ms Truss’s spokeswoman said: “Current levels of public sector pay will absolutely be maintained. Anything to suggest otherwise is simply wrong. Our hard-working frontline staff are the bedrock of society and there will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers.”
It was unclear how the Truss camp believed the policy had been misrepresented, with them clearly having stated that up to £8.8 billion could be saved by extending the move for all public sector workers. Former chief whip Mark Harper told Ms Truss to stop “blaming journalists – reporting what a press release says isn’t ‘wilful misrepresentation’”.
Mr Sunak’s camp argued that the move was no mistake, saying that Ms Truss had called for the move when she was chief secretary to the Treasury in 2018. “The lady is for turning,” a source said, mocking the Cabinet minister over comparisons she receives with former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Labour doubled down on its criticism of Liz Truss after she U-turned on her proposal to slash public sector pay. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said: “This latest mess has exposed exactly what Liz Truss thinks of public sector workers across Britain. Her proposal – and the fact she pushed for a similar change in 2018 when she was a Treasury minister – reveals her priority would be to slash the pay packets of working people."
She added: “That would suck money out of local economies and send our communities backward. Twelve years of the Tories and this is what we’re left with. They offer nothing but more of the same. Britain deserves better.”
The plan was contained in Ms Truss’s policy to save £11 billion by cutting Civil Service time off, scrapping jobs aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in the public sector, and by ending national pay deals. The last point would mean taking into account the regional cost of living when paying public sector workers. Her campaign had argued it could save up to £8.8 billion annually if it was adopted for all public sector workers in the long term.
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