Tories admit to ‘beating up’ on public services
The Conservatives have admitted that they have “belittled” people working in the public services, and promised to forge a new relationship with teachers and healthcare staff.
Shadow education secretary David Willetts noted the tense relationship the party had had with teachers in the past, and promised to stop “beating up on them”.
The interim report from the Tories’ public services taskforce also admits there has been a “vastly overstated focus” on what the public sector can learn from private firms.
And it says leader David Cameron should give an “unambiguous commitment to the growth of public services” as part of his pledge to improve the nation’s general well-being.
“In no field of policy is this need for a change of approach more obvious than in discussion of the public services,” notes the report, written by former health and education secretary Stephen Dorrell, and Baroness Perry.
“The political culture has often required the Conservatives to belittle the efforts of people whose objectives we share, and to defend indefensible consequences of policies for which the previous Conservative government was responsible.”
As part of the new “partnership with professions”, the taskforce says central government’s attempts to impose regulation on public servants have left many workers feeling demoralised.
It says teachers and social workers must be “inspired to give their best through the freedom to exercise their professional skills” – one way of doing this would be to allow all schools to run their own affairs.
However, public sector union Unison dismissed the report as a “phoney gimmick” to try to persuade Britain that public services were safe in Tory hands.
“These are warm words, indeed, but I honestly don’t believe that David Cameron or the Conservative party has suddenly seen the light,” said deputy general secretary Keith Sonnet.
He added: “The Conservative government presided over crumbling schools, record unemployment and massive interest rates. How can anyone trust what they say?”
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), which represents 300,000 civil servants, told politics.co.uk: “There is a lot of convincing to be done given the Conservatives’ track record when they were in power.
“And at the last general election, they were engaged with Labour in a Dutch auction to see how many civil service jobs they could cut.”
Today’s proposals are likely to be controversial with the right of the party. They suggest that as Britain gets richer, the government should expect to spend a “significant share of our additional national income” on public services.
“All Conservatives understand the economic and social benefits of lower taxes, but that does not mean that Conservatives cannot be committed to allowing the tax funded services to share the proceeds of growth,” the report says.
But a forthcoming report from the Thatcherite No Turning Back group, leaked to the Sunday Telegraph, will urge Mr Cameron to review his suggestion that tax cuts are unlikely ahead of the next general election.
In his introduction, former minister John Redwood warns: “This is a plea for early action to cut our tax rates.
“If you keep the proportion spent on public services down, you can benefit from lower taxes and faster growth, giving you a better rate of increase in the amount of money you have available for public spending.”
