Howard unveils plans to save £35bn
Conservative leader Michael Howard today unveiled plans for £35 billion of potential cuts in government spending to fund tax breaks and reinvestment in the public services.
He also revealed plans to cut 250,000 jobs from the civil service, but said there would be no compulsory redundancies.
Speaking on BBC One’s Breakfast with Frost, Mr Howard stressed that the sum of £35 billion was not simply a figure plucked out of the air.
“We have had a 60-strong team looking at every government department in a way that has never been done before and we’ve published the report so everybody can have a look”, he said.
“That has brought us to this figure of £35bn, it is an annual figure and that’s the amount which we say the Government are wasting.”
The Tories, he explained, would for instance save £900 million a year on asylum by bringing the current system, which he said was in “chaos”, under control.
Additionally, a Conservative government would also scrap regional health authorities “as they do not contribute anything to mainline health care.”
Mr Howard, outlining what he plans to do with the cuts in terms of spending and tax, said he would resist calls to simply plough the whole of the estimated £35 billion into tax cuts.
“I don’t agree with that”, he said.
Mr Howard reasoned: “The money that we save, for example, on cutting bureaucracy in the NHS will be spent on the NHS because I want us to have the best health care in the world.”
In additional, he said a Tory government would also direct the savings into the building of more prisons to ensure accommodation for all criminals.
Mr Howard stated: “Last week, unbelievably, the Government told judges not to send people to prison even if they thought it was appropriate to send them to prison because the prisons are full up.”
“It is the government’s duty to make sure that the people are kept safe and if there are criminals who should be sent to prison, the prison accommodation is there for them.”
Mr Howard also gave details of the party’s plans to devote savings into schools, international development and the military.
However, whilst a large percentage of the savings would be ploughed back into public services or reserved for balancing the books, Mr Howard said there will be cash left over for tax cuts.
“There will be some left over and we will be announcing tomorrow how much of that we will be applying to reducing the Government’s borrowing, to fill their black hole and then how much we have left over to deal with some of the unfair taxes”, he said.
On the issue of the civil service, Mr Howard confirmed plans to seek to cut 250,000 jobs.
This includes the 70,000 job losses which Chancellor Gordon Brown has already announced.
He was however keen to stress that such a figure would not be attained via the imposition of compulsory redundancies.
“We have been able to make sure that (compulsory redundancies), doesn’t happen”, Mr Howard stated.
He added: “Some of it will happen because we are going to have a civil service recruitment freeze from day one and most of the rest would be through voluntary redundancies and we’ve worked out how to pay for those.”
Mr Howard concluded by saying the “bottom line” is that at the general election the British people will have a choice between a Labour government “who will waste more and tax more” or a Conservative government that “would give them value for money and tax less.”
His comments come amid the findings of a new poll which suggests the Conservatives will perform poorly at the next election, possibly even worse than in the last two elections.
