Truss U-turn after outcry at pay plan
LIZ TRUSS has abandoned a flagship policy to slash £8.8 billion from public sector pay outside London after furious warnings from senior Conservatives that it would be “levelling down” the nation by leaving nurses, police officers and teachers poorer.
The Tory leadership frontrunner scrapped the plan to pay workers in cheaper regions less than their counterparts in the capital and the South East yesterday morning, a little over 12 hours after making the major announcement.
The Foreign Secretary insisted her policy had been “misrepresented”, amid growing blue-on-blue attacks, and argued people had been “unnecessarily worried” about cuts as she confirmed she would not be going ahead with the regional pay boards.
Conservative Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, who is backing Rishi Sunak, had said he had been left “actually speechless” by Ms Truss’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 the Sunak campaign argued that the plan would slash the pay of nearly six million public sector workers, with nurses, police and armed forces members facing £1,500 of cuts.
Speaking to the BBC in Dorset, Ms Truss said: “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.
“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 be going ahead.”
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 Margaret Thatcher.
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”’.
“So this U-turn has wiped out £8.8 billion in savings. Where are these going to come from now?” the Tory MP for the Forest of Dean said.
Unions representing civil servants had also reacted furiously to the plan.
Royal College of Nursing chief executive Pat Cullen said: “Thinking that salaries for nurses and support workers deserve cutting further should sound the death knell for her political ambitions.”