Leaked Remarks Suggest Conservatives Plan Spending Cuts Beyond £47bn Pledge

LONDON – The Conservative Party is preparing to make spending cuts well beyond the £47bn package it announced last year if it wins the next general election, according to leaked remarks by Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith.

The comments were made to party members in October last year, when Griffith was shadow business secretary. In them, he said the shadow cabinet had agreed the £47bn savings plan and had since discussed the need to go further. He cited the deteriorating state of the economy and the party’s ambition to cut taxes. Griffith said he was prepared to find additional savings in his own department and believed savings could be made in “every part of government.” He described cutting spending while letting people keep more of their earnings as central to what the Conservatives stand for.

The remarks surfaced on the eve of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. They suggest the party is considering reductions comparable in scale to the austerity programme of the 2010s.

A Conservative spokesperson confirmed that the party intends to go beyond the savings already announced. The spokesperson said that under Kemi Badenoch the party has consistently argued for a smaller state that does fewer things better. They added that the Birmingham conference would set out further reductions to the welfare bill and measures against wasteful spending.

Badenoch’s existing £47bn plan relies mainly on removing welfare entitlements for people who are not British or EU citizens. It also includes about £8bn from cutting 132,000 civil service jobs, £1.6bn from scrapping most of Labour’s clean energy programme, and more than £7bn from reductions to international aid.

On Friday, the Conservative leader announced a further £4bn in cuts. These include taking an additional £2.5bn from the aid budget, which would leave it at about £1bn a year, and reducing the budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport by £1bn. Badenoch said half of these savings would fund 50,000 new prison places. She has previously committed to using half of any savings to reduce the deficit.

Griffith was promoted to shadow chancellor in August. He previously served as chief operating officer of Sky. As a Treasury minister under Kwasi Kwarteng, he was among those who defended the 2022 mini-budget during the market turmoil that followed it.

The leak comes as Badenoch seeks to draw a sharp contrast with Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Burnham has promised costly initiatives, including a national care service and public control of utility companies, as part of his pledge to end what he calls four decades of neoliberalism. Badenoch, who has described Margaret Thatcher as her hero, is offering lower taxes and a much smaller state. She defended privatisation in a television interview on Friday and rejected state control of water companies as the answer to the sector’s problems.

The Conservatives remain third in the opinion polls, behind Labour and Reform UK. However, Badenoch’s personal ratings have improved over the past year.