Despite the excitement outside the Tory conference hall in Manchester about Rishi Sunak deciding he would indeed scrap the Manchester leg of HS2, Jeremy Hunt didn’t mention it in his speech. He talked about the need to reduce costs long-term and said that public spending needed to come down. But the contribution of the high speed rail line to that public spending bill wasn’t something he covered at all. So the mystery and leaks continue.
What Hunt did want to say, and very early on in his rather short speech, was that ‘the level of tax is too high’. This was the line he needed to offer to rebellious Tory MPs and members, many of whom had just mobbed Liz Truss at her own ‘rally’ on the conference fringe. He argued that the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others were ‘wrong’ when they claimed it was a ‘permanent shift’ to a high tax economy, and that ‘we need a more productive state, not a bigger state’. This would also mean the Treasury changing its focus from ‘short-term cost control to long-term cost reduction’, which is a promise many chancellors make but few make much headway on – despite being in charge.
The conference hall was packed this afternoon, but the atmosphere still reasonably flat
As part of this long-term cost reduction, Hunt told the hall that he would be freezing the expansion of the civil service and reducing its numbers to pre-pandemic levels. He has commissioned his junior colleague John Glen to ‘restart the process of public sector reform’, and ‘find out’ why frontline workers such as teachers, police officers and doctors are spending more of their time on admin than those they are supposed to be serving. He will not unfreeze civil service recruitment until there is a ‘proper plan for productivity’.
Other announcements included his pre-trailed crackdown on benefits conditionality, which he used to attack Labour for wanting to remove sanctions for those who do not do enough to look for work. He also confirmed that no-one should be denied a bank account because of their political views, which allowed him to joke about the SNP needing to withdraw cash for their motorhomes.
The conference hall was packed this afternoon, but the atmosphere still reasonably flat. Hunt started by saying ‘it’s great to be in Manchester!’, which is what politicians always say at every conference held here. Neither he nor any of his colleagues who have spoken so far have offered any sense of what’s great for Manchester in this conference.
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