Tory leadership contest: Screeching Liz Truss U-turn on public sector pay plan

The Tory leadership frontrunner scrapped the plan to pay workers in cheaper regions less than their counterparts in London and the South East yesterday morning, a little over 12 hours after making the major announcement.

A spokeswoman for the foreign secretary’s campaign claimed there had been “wilful misrepresentation” of the proposal amid growing blue-on-blue attacks, but made clear they would be dropping it and instead maintaining current levels of pay.

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.

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.”

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.

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’”.