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Shrewsbury & Atcham

View candidate responses for Shrewsbury & Atcham to our public service pledges.

Daniel Kawczynski (Conservative) 

Thank you very much for your letter and the opportunity to outline Conservative views on the public services.
 
As David Cameron has explained: “instead of using public servants as scapegoats we should acknowledge their successes. Instead of constantly beating up on the public sector and telling it to be more like the private sector, let’s be more reasonable and constructive” (Speech to the National Consumer Council, 6 June 2006).
 
Conservatives have always focused, rightly, on giving taxpayers value for money. But we also recognise the important role played by the dedicated public sector professionals who work hard to improve the quality of people’s lives. Conservatives value that commitment, and trust their professional responsibility.
 
1.   I pledge to work to ensure that public services are properly resourced and delivered by the public sector and that there are no further local office closures, public sector job cuts or privatisations.
 
Of course we plan to ensure that public services are properly resourced. However, due to the strains on the public finances, whichever party wins the next election, public spending will have to be cut.
 
We have set out several examples of specific savings that should be made in addition to the tens of billions of pounds of efficiency savings and productivity improvements that the Conservatives would deliver throughout the public sector over the next Parliament in order to reduce waste, deliver more for less, and protect frontline public services.
 
For example, we are calling for a pay freeze in 2011 for the entire public sector barring the million lowest paid employees. This will generate savings equivalent to protecting 100,000 public sector jobs.
 
2.   I pledge to support measures aimed at closing the UK tax gap, including recruiting HMRC staff and ensuring tax loopholes are closed.
 
People and businesses should pay the taxes which are properly due.  HMRC has faced a number of significant challenges in recent years and we want to ensure that it becomes a more effective tax collecting agency.  We want to work with management and staff at HMRC to ensure that taxpayers pay the right amount of tax and receive a high quality service
 
3.   I pledge to support civil service national pay bargaining and to press the government to offer pay increases to public sector workers at least in line with inflation.
 
I would like to assure you that modern Conservatives have a huge respect for the many committed public servants. But it is because we treat people with respect that we are being straight about the choices we face.  The truth is that at a time of crisis there is an inevitable and difficult trade-off between securing jobs and restraining pay.
 
Conservatives are calling for a pay freeze in 2011 for the entire public sector barring the million lowest paid employees. We should not include public servants earning less than £18,000, because we do not believe in balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest. We will respect pay deals which have already been announced.
 
Freezing pay will help to protect public sector jobs.  This pay freeze would generate annual savings of more than £3 billion. This will generate savings equivalent to protecting 100,000 public sector jobs. I note that local government pay is a devolved issue for local councils.
 
4.   I pledge to urge the government to honour the 2005 commitment on public sector pensions and to defend the rights of existing members of the civil service compensation scheme.
 
We believe that the Government should find ways to cap the biggest government pensions, including those for senior civil servants, local council executives and quango managers.
 
Indeed, as the Labour Chairman of the Commons Committee on Work and Pensions said, ‘Some people who are earning £200-£250,000 a year can see a pension in the range of £150,000. I think most people would think that that was excessive. Perhaps there should be a cap of, say, somewhere around £50,000.’
 
This cap should prevent any taxpayer-funded increase in senior government pensions already worth over £50,000 a year, and stop all taxpayer-funded pensions for these groups in future exceeding £50,000 a year. This would reduce the growth of public sector pension liabilities by hundreds of millions of pounds over the next decade. We also believe in greater transparency over the pay and perks of senior public officials.
 
It is important to stress that any change should reflect the principle that existing benefits accrued by staff must be protected. The Government should also consider the appropriate process for working with the relevant representative groups to implement this policy.
 
5.   I pledge to campaign to ensure any changes to public services are only made after proper equality impact assessments have been conducted and their findings implemented.

I am committed to ensuring everyone is treated equally and with respect and of course it is important that public services are delivered in a fair, non-discriminatory way. There is already guidance to ensure that key policies are assessed for their impact on equality, as well as potential impact on rural areas, privacy, the voluntary sector and small firms. We need to ensure that this is implemented whilst at the same time ensuring that we do not add unnecessary extra red tape which could ultimately undermine public services by directing resources away from the front line.

I hope this response is helpful. Thank you again for allowing me the opportunity to explain my Party’s position on this vital issue

Charles West (Lib Dem) 

 

Thank you for writing to me regarding your five pledges for public services. Please find my comments on each of the pledges below:

1. I pledge to work to ensure that public services are properly resourced and delivered by the public sector and that there are nofurther local office closures, public sector job cuts or privatisations.

Liberal Democrats support the underlying principles of your call for quality public services, but the current economic climate will requiresome degree of public sector restraint. We cannot therefore  guararantee that there will be no public sector job cuts or local office closures.

2. I pledge to support measures aimed at closing the UK tax gap including recruiting HMRC staff and ensuring tax loopholes are closed.

The Government estimates that there is a tax gap of £40bn over half of which could prevented by appropriate anti-evasion principles.Liberal Democrats will also create a rule which looks through transactions so that properties which have been transferred as part of a company still have to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax. Finally, using resources freed up from among other things removing 3.6m people from income tax through our reform of the tax system, we will invest in anti-evasion capabilities within HMRC. The key focus will be to find those who work outside the tax system and bring them into it.These proposals may well require more staff but this would be funded by commercial rate charges levied for pre-clearance services. In addition,by reducing the number of people in the income tax system, we wouldexpect to free up a considerable amount of staff time.

3. I pledge to support civil service national pay bargaining and to press the government to offer pay increases to public sector workers at least in line with inflation.

Liberal Democrats have already announced a unique policy for public sector pay. As we pay down the budget deficit, public sector budgets are inevitably going to come under ever greater pressure.

If we are to prevent widespread job losses in the public sector their will have to be pay restraint. Liberal Democrats will therefore cap public sector pay rises at £400 per person for two years to limit the growth of the public sector pay bill while ensuring fairness public sector workers. By capping pay rises in this way we will ensure that those with the lowest salaries receive the highest percentage increases. Within the £400 pay cap pay will be negotiated as under the current system.

4. I pledge to honour the 2005 commitment on public sector pensions and defend the rights of existing members of the civil service pension scheme.

At present, all bar one (the Local Government Pension Scheme) of the public sector pension schemes are unfunded. This means that rather than the contributions paid by the employees and employers being invested to pay for future pension payments, they go to the Treasury and are used to pay current pensions. This means nothing is being saved or put aside to meet future pension costs because all the money is used to pay the pensions of people who have already retired.

In recent years the cost of the pensions of those who have retired has been larger than the contributions coming in from current workers and the Treasury is having to use tax receipts to plug the gap. This year plugging the gap will cost the Treasury an estimated £4.1bn, twenty times the amount it had to pay in 2005. Predictions are that this gap will only grow wider.

In addition, those who do best out of public sector pensions are not low paid teachers or nurses, but rather high-flying civil servants, judges and NHS execs who receive large increases in their salaries at the end of their careers. Liberal Democrats will therefore immediately establish an independent commission, along the lines of the Turner commission which looked into other pensions issues a few years ago, to examine the long-term future of public sector pensions.

We would ask the commission to look, on a scheme-by-scheme basis, at issues such as pay levels in public and private sector, relative job security, the level of contributions that scheme members already make, the structure of pensions in retirement, scheme retirement ages, the way in which benefits are calculated and the cost of the scheme to the taxpayer.

However, Liberal Democrats believe that a pension promise made should be a pension promise kept. We are therefore committed to not making any changes to pension rights that have already been accrued by public sector workers.

5. I pledge to campaign to ensure any changes to public services are only made after proper equality impact assessments have been conducted and their findings implemented.

Of course it is very important that the equality implications of any reforms are fully taken into account.

Dr Charles West (Lib Dem)