Tories slam the Labour 'waste'

SHADOW Chancellor Oliver Letwin described Gordon Brown's Pre-Budget Report as a 'grand speech that masks the truth'.

Responding to Brown's statement to the House of Commons, Letwin attacked the Chancellor's proposals as disguising massive waste in the public sector.

He criticised Labour for increasing the cost of Central Government bureaucracy, saying that the 'savings' unveiled in the Pre-Budget Report simply disguised expenditure elsewhere.

'The number of tax collectors has risen twice as fast as the number of new nurses,' Letwin retorted to claims by the Chancellor that the number of civil servants is set to fall under new restructuring proposals.

'The bill for management consultants is now £1bn a year. The Chancellor says that Britain is working, but it's the bureaucrats and the management consultants who are at work,' he added.

Highlighting the extent to which tax will form the centre ground of the next General Election, Letwin pointed to Labour tax rises as a reason why people should not trust the Government.

'Taxes are up by £5,000 per year per family while 5,000 die every year from infections that they have picked up in hospital. All this represents a fundamental failure of public sector delivery,' Letwin said, adding: 'The Chancellor is incapable of recognising that the inheritance we built up...was the strongest inheritance that we've had in living memory.'

Productivity had dropped by a third according to Office of National Statistics figures and was below the European Union average, Letwin declared.

Britain had dropped from fourth to eleventh in the international competitiveness league, he said, there was a record trade deficit and 790,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost.

Six-sevenths of growth in the last quarter was due to the public sector. The economy's growth was slower than for any other major English-speaking economy and half that in Ireland.

Between 1998 and 2003, the Government passed 23,322 new regulations - a 53% increase on figures for 1979 to 1996.

The CBI estimated Brown had added £15bn-a-year in costs on business through increased regulation and taxes, he said.

The savings ratio has fallen by a third, household debt exceeded one trillion pounds and pension funds had been hit by a raid on their funds.

'The stability that the Chancellor is so proud of is due exclusively to his allowing other people to determine his fiscal policy in the first two years and his monetary policy throughout,' Letwin said.

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