But the Tory leadership’s campaign for hope, which received another boost with the backing of Penny Mordaunt on Monday, was forced to repeat some of its figures within hours of publishing a raft of proposals to cut the cost of the public service . These included less payments to staff outside London and a cut in annual holiday pay. Truss also promised to “fight 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 run a more agile, more efficient, more focused Whitehall that prioritizes the things that really matter to people and is laser-focused on frontline services,” he said. “There is too much bureaucracy and stale groupthink in Whitehall.” Trade unions and policy experts condemned the plans as unworkable and said the Trust had dramatically exaggerated the potential savings it claimed would be £11 billion a year. The most important element of the plan is the introduction of regional pay commissions, which he said would “adjust payments to the cost of living where public servants actually work”. It claimed this would save up to £8.8bn. Experts questioned whether the savings were feasible. Alex Thomas, program director at the Institute for Government, said: “If you’re only talking about civil servants, that’s ridiculous. it doesn’t add up at all. the whole [annual] The salary of civil servants is about £9 billion.’ He suggested that regional pay boards might be a sensible scheme but would only deliver something like the savings suggested by Truss if they were implemented across the whole of the public sector, including the NHS, schools and local government, which is likely to include a long negotiation process. “It is not a bad thing for the public sector to match its pay scales with the part of the country in which it operates. But you only get those numbers if you’re talking about a doctor or a nurse or a school principal, who is already working outside of London on 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 negotiations for the entire public sector of around 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 civil servants, or around 90,000 jobs. The Truss group claimed that relocating civil servants out of London would save £557 million a year by avoiding the need to pay them a special burden for working in the capital. But they overestimated the savings by around £400m and were forced to correct it to £153m on Monday afternoon. Addressing Truss’ suggestion that civil servant wages outside London can distort the labor market if they are higher than the going rate locally, Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union, compared it to the approach of P&O Ferries, the which was criticized for reducing staff pay and conditions. “Instead of taking a page out of the P&O Ferries handbook, Liz Truss should focus on ensuring that the public administration has the right people with the right skills to deliver high quality public services and meet the challenges this government faces at the moment, including the recovery from the pending Covid and the new war in continental Europe,” he said. Other aspects of Truss’s plan include saving £2bn by cutting civil servants’ annual leave allowance by two days. He also said he would bar civil servant union representatives from using taxpayer-funded “grace time” to plan strike action. The Truss team said this would save up to £137m a year, but unions insist there are already strict restrictions on how installation time can be used. Oliver Dowden, then a Cabinet Office minister, told MPs in 2019 that relief time represented 0.06% of public sector wages and the government was already cutting it. Truss also announced she would stop a proposed ban on buy-one-get-one-free deals on junk food, in an interview with the Daily Mail where she attacked “government levies for nannies”. Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said Truss was “declaring war on herself with her fantastic recipe for flattening”. He said the Conservative government had overseen “epic waste” even during the pandemic. “Her ‘tailored’ pay plans would reduce northerners’ pay, exacerbating the gap that already exists. This unknown government’s commitment to level up is dead. “Now Liz Truss is committing to even more cuts that will worsen the delays we already have at courts, airports and GPs, leaving people waiting for passports, driving licenses and vital appointments.” In her final message to Tory MPs as the ballot papers were posted, Truss promised to “be bold” and “work hard to keep our promises” to win the next election, which she said would be in 2024. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST In a final blow to Rishi Sunak, her leading rival, she said: “We cannot continue to have business-as-usual, and I have a bold plan to get our economy back on track.”
