London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2025

Liz Truss’s plans to cut public sector pay leave Tory mayor ‘speechless’

Liz Truss’s plans to cut public sector pay leave Tory mayor ‘speechless’

Leadership candidate’s plan would hit nurses, police officers and armed forces, says Sunak backer
The Conservative mayor of Tees Valley has said he is “speechless” at plans by Liz Truss to slash £8.8bn from public sector pay outside London, saying it would hit nurses and police officers.

Ben Houchen, a backer of Rishi Sunak, said there was no way the figure could be achieved without pay cuts outside London that would hit levelling up.

“Actually speechless,” he tweeted. “There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5 million people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London. So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside would be undone.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg has denied Truss plans to slash the pay of public sector workers outside the capital by introducing regional pay boards, as senior figures questioned how billions of promised savings could be made. The original policy release from Truss said it could be “adopted for all public sector workers in the long term”.

Rees-Mogg, a backer of Truss and the minister in charge of civil service efficiencies, said it was “not the plan at the moment” to cut pay for the wider public sector to make savings of £8.8bn promised by Truss. “The discussion at the moment is around civil servants,” he said.

The most significant element of the plan is the introduction of regional pay boards, which Truss said would “tailor pay to the cost of living where civil servants actually work”. She claimed this would save up to £8.8bn.

Experts questioned whether the savings were feasible. Alex Thomas, a programme director at the Institute for Government thinktank, said the whole annual civil service pay bill was about £9bn.

Mike Clancy, the general secretary of the Prospect trade union, said it would make civil service recruitment more difficult. “The civil service is already struggling to recruit and retain employees in the face of crippling pay cuts, threats of redundancy and continuous attacks from ministers,” he said.

“Making working for the civil service even less attractive by reducing leave, cutting pay for people outside of London, and removing roles dedicated to reducing inequality will only make recruitment harder and leave us unable to provide vital services.”

In a revised statement, Truss’s campaign said it was “the potential savings if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers in the long term” – which would include public sector employees such as teachers and nurses.

Rees-Mogg said it was right to save money by moving civil servants out of London. “You don’t have the London weighting or the London allowance. And property costs are lower outside London. These are really important benefits.

“And it ties in with levelling up because you’re moving the jobs out of London. But at the same time we need a smaller civil service. We have 91,000 more people working for the civil service than we did in 2016. You need to get back to the 2016 level. That on its own will save about £3.5bn, potentially more.”

Thomas said the figures did not add up if applied only to civil servants. “It’s going to come from the wider public sector, it’s going to come from nurses and teachers and local authorities,” he said.

He said the “complicated and controversial” move would mean nurses and teachers being paid less or receiving slower pay rises than others, adding: “This is not war on Whitehall, it’s more like war on Workington.”

Rees-Mogg also said Truss would be right to rid the civil service of all diversity and inclusion programmes. “We had a training programme called Check Yo’Privilege – what on earth is that? Why are we wasting people’s time with a course that doesn’t help people do their jobs better?

“What do we want from the civil service? We want people to get their passports on time. We want people to get their driving licence on time, we want the probate service to work.”
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
EU Deploys New Biometric Entry/Exit System: What Non-EU Travelers Must Know
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
×