Liz Truss abandons £8.8bn policy to reduce public sector pay following backlash

Liz Truss has abandoned a flagship policy to slash £8.8 billion from public sector pay after senior Conservatives warned that the plans would leave nurses, police officers and teachers poorer. The Tory leadership candidate was accused of 'levelling down' the nation and has now abandoned plans to pay workers in cheaper regions less than their counterparts in London and the South East.

Conservative Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, who is backing Rishi Sunak against Ms Truss to be the next Tory leader and Prime Minister, said he had been left “actually speechless” by the foreign secretary'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 today, a spokeswoman for Ms Truss’s campaign claimed there had been “wilful misrepresentation” of the proposal amid growing blue-on-blue attacks. She made clear they would be dropping it and instead maintaining current levels of pay.

READ MORE: Liz Truss criticised over plans to lower pay for public sector workers

Speaking after the u-turn, Ms Truss said people were “unnecessarily worried” about the now-abandoned plans for regional pay boards. She told the BBC in Dorset: “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