Letters: My cuts are real, says Francis Maude

We’ve only just begun

Sir: In Ross Clark’s article ‘Cuts, what cuts?’ (22 June), he suggested that I was boasting about saving the taxpayer £5.5 billion. It’s true: I’m proud of my department’s Efficiency and Reform Group and the work of civil servants across Whitehall who have sliced out wasteful spending. But the figures he used were 12 months out of date. Last year we saved the public purse £10 billion — 80 per cent up on the figure he quoted. That increase — which doesn’t include the savings from tackling fraud, error and uncollected debt — rather put pay to the Audit Office’s concern that our earlier savings might not have been sustainable.
Ross Clark called for reforms to terms and conditions. Indeed he quoted a Taxpayers’ Alliance press release without noting that the Alliance themselves paid tribute to my department’s savings. We are already working to modernise civil service terms and conditions: we have reduced privilege day entitlement and the maximum annual leave allowance for new starters. Last year alone we saved £3.4 billion by reforming pensions and reducing the civil service, now at its smallest size since the second world war.
This government is taking bold decisions to drive up efficiency and slash costs. There’s still a long way to go to clamp down on waste and I would like to reassure Ross that we are nowhere near done yet.
Rt Hon Francis Maude MP
Minister for the Cabinet Office
London SW1

Patently untrue

Sir: My friend and former colleague the excellent Martin Vander Weyer has taken me to task in your pages (Any other business, 15 June) for my remarks in a recent Treasury Committee hearing with Dame Clara Furse. Among other things, he says ‘members [of the Treasury Committee, including Andrea Leadsom and myself] competed to express scorn for Dame Clara and her track record — Norman winning by announcing that she was “amazingly unimpressive”.’