This is the speech delivered by Tom Tugendhat yesterday.
Good afternoon everybody. Thank you very much for making the effort to come.
Let me start off by saying some proper thank yous.
Thank you to those who care for us and protect us.
Thank you to those who teach us and defend us.
Thank you to all those who feed and support us.
These people are vital to our national life. But not all of them are employed by the state.
Public service in our country comes in so many forms. But there is a difference between the state and society.
And I want to start by recognising and thanking them.
We all know – that many, in fact most public service is done by charities, communities, volunteers and – of course – family. Many are making great sacrifices to serve others first.
They are public servants as much as any government employee.
We saw in Covid how dependent we are on many millions whose efforts to keep us fed – in supermarkets and delivery companies, on farms and in factories – too often go unnoticed until they’re not there.
They are valued and we need them all.
Today though, I want to talk to you about government-funded public services, government-provided services. Although to be honest, I should start by admitting that the phrase – public services – leaves me a little cold.
It’s like the old Blairite shorthand of “schools and hospitals”, it fails to carry the importance of what we mean.
It doesn’t capture the dedication that goes into educating a child, bringing up kids who can’t live with their biological parents, or curing a patient, or caring for somebody with dementia, or helping somebody into work, or keeping a local estate safe, or even putting a young offender back on track, or risking your life fighting a fire, or, of course, engaging the enemy in the defence of our country and its interests.
When a family worries about granny, the bureaucrat talks about the system, but the family simply wants to know that their grandmother will receive the care and be accorded the dignity that she deserves.
When a neighbour sees crime on their street, professionals talk about “mission boards” and statistics, but that doesn’t make us feel safe. We want to know the law is on our side, that it will be fair and just, and that help is near.
And when parents worry about their child’s education being disrupted or standards slipping, we don’t want ideological policies to stop school exclusions.
And we don’t want to be told we’re wrong to worry or indeed what to think.
We want a headteacher who understands that these moments are vital to our children’s education and to their future and a school leader who has the discretion to do what’s right for the class.
Today, we talk too much about systems, and not enough about people.
Too much about centralised policies, binding mandates and legal frameworks, and not enough about what makes professionals adapt and respond to a local need. Too much about the state, and not enough about those ‘little platoons’ – the families, the communities, the charities, mutuals and small groups of public servants – who know better than Whitehall how best to tackle the challenges before them.
Centralised and bureaucratic cultures always create a gravitational pull drawing in more power if unchecked. It’s like the march of cultural Marxism which puts the system over the human forgetting that the government should serve the people, and not force us into a system convenient itself.
In other words, we have too much bureaucracy, and not enough humanity. We have too much state, and not enough society.
Every system – however caring – naturally draws control into itself, and bureaucrats – however well-intentioned – naturally focus on the processes they can control, and less on the outcomes they cannot.
We need reform to remember purpose, and not just process, to empower individuals, improve care and deliver the world-class service that the British people deserve.
As Conservatives, we know that the best ideas only come when you trust people to act as they know best. When you take the politics out and put people back in charge.
Now, I want to set out the principles that shape how I think about investing, reforming, and protecting our public services.
And later on, I will set out the seven principles that I think matter.
I will talk about the Mission, the Purpose, Money, of course, the interconnections, Trust, People and Demand. But let me start by talking about something that, as a father, matters to me very personally. Schools.
Now, I am very proud of what we’ve achieved in education. And the recent exam results bare that out. I offer my congratulations to all those who did so well in T-Levels and A-Levels, in BTECs and in GCSEs. You told us what we all know – education in England has improved markedly over the last decade.
Now, thanks to Conservative education reforms, English schools are among the best performing in the world. We remembered the purpose was to educate a generation, and free teachers to teach and freed parents to choose.
That’s why we have the best primary school readers in the Western world.
And Secondary school students are 11th in the world in maths – up from 27th under Labour – 13th in the world for science – up from 16th under Labour – and 13th in the world in reading – up from 25th under Labour. 90 per cent of state schools are now good or outstanding – up from 68 per cent under Labour. And we can see that difference because when Labour and the SNP have been in charge in Wales and in Scotland, our successes have not been matched.
They have let children down, and then sought to blame others.
In their first weeks in power, Labour ministers rushed to tell us that many of the reforms behind this success story – freedoms for headteachers, strict discipline policies, a clear inspection framework, and a knowledge-rich curriculum – will now be scrapped.
Instead of building on our reforms – which themselves are, let’s give credit, built on Tony Blair’s reforms, who himself built on Margaret Thatcher’s reforms – Labour wants to go backwards.
They want to follow the approach they chose in Wales, where direction comes from the centre with no free schools, no academies, no knowledge-rich curriculum.
And the result is predictable – and predicted: the average pupil performs at the same level as the most disadvantaged pupil in England.
Make no mistake. This is an act of ideological vandalism – and we will fight it every inch of the way.
Labour have shown us who they really are.
Unfortunately, reversing school reforms is not the only way that Labour have already revealed themselves.
Before the election – just weeks ago – Rachel Reeves promised every Labour policy was – and I quote – “fully funded and fully costed – no ifs, no ands, no buts, no additional tax rises.”
Such was the suspicion that Labour had no intention of keeping this promise, that the Financial Times asked her if, upon election, she would claim that the fiscal position was worse than she had previously realised, then she could put up taxes.
Her answer was very clear. “We’ve got the Office for Budget Responsibility now,” she said. “You don’t need to win an election to find out” about the public finances.
But this is exactly the trick she is now trying to pull.
She has changed her tune and says, “I don’t think anyone realised quite how bad things were” and claims that Labour have inherited “the worst set of circumstances since the Second World War”. It’s noticeable that no respectable economist has repeated that.
The economy is growing, employment is up and the deficit is down.
Recollections, clearly, vary.
We know this was Labour’s plan all along because those on the inside let the truth slip.
In June The Guardian quoted Labour sources saying, once in power, Reeves would claim to be surprised by her inheritance and seek a “doctor’s mandate”, increasing taxes all over.
The sources said she would take a “kitchen sink” approach to tax rises. They admitted, “this is not what they are presenting the public with right now”.
The so-called fiscal black hole the Chancellor has invented since the election consists of normal in-year cyclical spending pressures – something every minister knows the Treasury always manages – and of course her own decisions on public sector pay.
And this of course is the point.
Labour are pretending they have no option but to do what they are doing. But that’s just not right. They are doing what they are doing because they have made a choice to do it – and a choice to be dishonest about it.
Sir Keir’s right that things will get worse with his politics of pessimism but not because of anyone else.
It’s because he chose to give a 22 per cent pay rise for some doctors – backdated to when they were on strike.
He chose to offer train drivers represented by Aslef – which bankrolls his party – a 15 per cent pay rise.
Sir Keir says he did it to settle the dispute but the next day the same union announced a strike.
He has paid everything and he has settled nothing.
He said those with the broadest shoulders must pay – it’s clear now he means pensioners. He’s abolishing the Winter Fuel Allowance for those on as little as £221.20 a week and he’s putting up taxes.
And they’re doing these things because they are owned – lock, stock and barrel – by the unions.
The unions gave Labour more than £25 million over the last Parliament, and in return Labour ministers are giving in to the unions’ demands.
Scrapping laws that guarantee minimum services during strikes. Ending rules that make sure strikes only happen when members actually want them. And showering the unions with public money, “no strings attached.” Sir Keir says that problems in our economy and our public services have to be tackled “at root”, and that there are no quick fixes. Well, he’s right – but what have he and Rachel Reeves actually done about it?
Pay rises for unions instead of investing in hospitals and infrastructure. That’s what Labour always does.
And now – after this – Sir Keir has the audacity to tell us to expect worse still, warning us the upcoming Budget will be “painful”.
Of course it will. He’s splashed the cash on his friends and left you to pick up the bill. It’s no wonder Labour are softening us up for tax rises they said would never come.
After the hard graft we put in bringing the price rises back under control so that inflation is back on target, he’s already losing control of pay across the public sector – with other unions now demanding more and threatening more strike action. It feels like we’re heading back towards the 1970s and the days of wage / price spirals.
Just as importantly, it’s a missed opportunity for reform and a chance to make our public services better.
Unlike Conservative ministers before them – and dare I say it some New Labour ministers as well – this Government asked nothing of the unions in return for these inflation-busting pay rises.
Before the election Wes Streeting – 22% Wes – talked up his willingness to be bold, to reform the NHS without sentimentality.
And yet he asked for nothing in return. Why? “Dunno”. Do Labour ministers tremble and lose their tongues when they see their union paymasters?
Do they quiver at the sight of a union ballot? They have no plans, no ideas, and no vision to improve the country.
But they do have instincts and they do have ideology. They want to level-down, not up.
They want to take away, not build. They want a bigger, more centralised, state. They want to please their union paymasters, and they want to borrow, to tax and to spend.
Because that’s what Labour always do.
If you need convincing about this weird worship of the state, remember the election campaign.
Keir Starmer was asked: if a loved one was “on a waiting list for surgery, would you, if you felt that that was the only way forward, use private healthcare?”
Starmer’s answer was uncharacteristically clear. He said “no”. I don’t think the Prime Minister understands quite how weird it is to put your faith in the state ahead of your own family. It really is odd.
Ordinary people work hard and care for their families. The Prime Minister’s taxes will make it harder for everyone to do just that.
And it is not just healthcare. One of Labour’s few real policies in the whole election campaign was to tax private schools.
They’ve now announced the tax will start in the middle of the school year, bouncing parents and leaving them to find other schools right now if they think they won’t be able to afford the higher fees.
How much work have civil servants done to work out how many will move? How many will go to local state schools?
How many have places available for them next week?
We are talking about children here, and parents who are trying their best for them.
And they’ll say they’re attacking the rich and the privileged but they’re not. They are attacking families. They’re making it harder for all those struggling to give their children the best – as every parent would.
Why should my friend’s child at a ballet school who is dancing towards her dreams even though the family could never afford the fees without a generous scholarship – be forced to quit because neither her family nor the school can afford the tax hike? Her family are already foster-carers and stretched to afford what their kids need and provide what they can for all others they care for.
Why should she lose out on her dream because of the 1970s vindictive politics of envy are back?
This Government is callous and cruel.
Conservatives will always be on the side of those determined to do their best for their family. We’re on the side of grandparents who look after their grandchildren. We’re on the side of those who work, save and pass the rewards on to their children. We’re on the side of those who make sure their kids turn up to school ready to learn, and want their classroom safe.
And yes, we are on the side of those who would pay for private healthcare to heal a loved one if they needed it.
We’re on the side of parents who find tutors for their kids if they need it.
We’re on the side of those who choose to pay more on a mortgage or to be near a school or choose to pay fees in a school that’s better for their kids.
Now, of course, not everyone can afford this – and of course public policy must be about improving public services of all kinds everywhere – but as Labour in Wales show, you don’t improve anyone’s chances by levelling down or stopping people from making their own choices.
I believe it is morally good for people to do what they can to improve the lives of their children and families. For individuals to strive for what is best for their families and communities.
As Conservatives we simply cannot fathom those who have money and refuse to do whatever it takes for their families.
For us, and for what we stand for, the individual, the family and society are all more important to us than the state.
We know that the state should work for us, not define us. It should protect us, not constrain us.
Labour just don’t get this. That’s just one reason they are doomed to fail our services.
They don’t understand that we have to build trust and empower. Instead they are determined to hoard power and centralise.
After all, Keir Starmer doesn’t even trust his own Cabinet to make decisions.
Their answer to everything is centralisation and bureaucracy. Channel crossings? They set up a unit.
Careers for young people? They set up a quango. Grow the economy? They promise a mission board.
They serve the system that leads nowhere and acts for no one. That’s 1970s socialism all over again.
Meanwhile the little platoons – those nimble groups and organisations innovating, pushing for change, responding to need, competing with ideas and innovation – are already being crushed.
Academy freedoms – under attack. Free schools – no more. Organisations like Unlocked – which does so much to get talented graduates into the prisoner service – already gone.
The best Conservative reforms came when we trusted the frontline professionals. When we were clear in our expectations, and let the professionals get on with the job, they more than delivered. They excelled. This did not mean a free-for-all, or licence to do what you want, unchecked.
We set professionals tough objectives, trusted them to work out how to deliver, and built the right accountability frameworks, through data transparency and inspection for a healthy balance which favoured the frontline over the centre.
In short, we aligned authority, responsibility, and accountability.
When we didn’t stick to these principles, things went wrong.
Now, I have already said elsewhere that my Party needs to acknowledge our failures. We said migration would come down, it went up.
We said taxes would come down, and overall they went up. We also need to accept that our attempts in the Coalition period to reform the NHS – made with the best of intentions – failed.
By making NHS England independent, we created the biggest unaccountable quango in the Western world.
By allowing it to centralise power, we stopped trusting frontline professionals and local staff.
By creating complex clinical commissioning procedures, we created a bureaucracy instead of eliminating it.
By putting so much power into the hands of the NHS chief executive, we made her responsible for everything but accountable for nothing.
It’s true that we spend more on the NHS than ever before.
And it’s true that we have more consultants, more junior doctors, more nurses, more health visitors and more clinical support staff than ever before.
And it is true that in the last five years, we went through the unprecedented challenge of a global pandemic.
But it’s also true that the cost of health treatments is rising, and with an ageing population we have more demand for healthcare than ever before. Demand is going to stay high for decades to come.
We will not deliver what we said we would. We did not keep our promises on rebuilding hospitals. We did not manage to get waiting lists down. We can blame inflation, and we can point to Covid. Both of these are important factors, but no matter: we did promise more than we delivered.
Now Labour look like they’re going to make the same mistake.
We need a new approach. But before I set out my principles for reform and some examples, I just want to say something about the elephant in the room, which is population growth – fuelled by migration.
Now of course, many migrants do vital and important work in public services, but migration creates new demand for public services – as well as demand for infrastructure, housing and more.
Migrants of course also pay taxes, but as research from Europe shows, some are net contributors, while many bring a net lifetime fiscal cost.
And regardless of contribution, migration strains the capital stock of the country: divide the same number of houses, roads, schools and hospitals by a larger population and, well, we can all do the maths.
We need to have an honest conversation about population. Numbers matter.
Our current way of doing things has given us an economy that has to bring in more and more people from elsewhere while people who live here have fewer and fewer children.
That puts our population on a permanent upwards trajectory, but that clearly can’t continue forever. That’s just simply a statement of fact.
Now, I know some people have a strong reaction when politicians talk about population. And that’s fine. But, I’d much rather we had this conversation, debated the issues in the national interest, rather than letting it fester, unaddressed because politicians are afraid to talk about it. Or, worse, supported businesses who demanded cheaper workers while claiming we were doing what we could to bring numbers down.
An honest and open conversation about population size is the only way to have a country that is happy with itself, where everyone – of all colours, creeds and backgrounds – knows that they can speak and be heard.
What we decide will have to recognise that we cannot build the first-class public services we need without taking numbers into account.
It will take reform – to visa policy, to welfare, to workforce planning, skills and training policies, and university finances – but the pressure on housing, on infrastructure and on services is just one reason why the Conservative Party under my leadership will commit to a legally binding annual cap on non-British annual net migration of 100,000. We cannot sustain the hundreds of thousands it is today.
And this brings me on to my seven principles of reform.
First: a clear mission. The mission of the welfare system is to support people in their moment of need and help everyone who can work to work. It is not to park those who cannot or will not work on benefits and ignore them for a lifetime.
Universal Credit and welfare reform are great Conservative achievements. They recognise that dignity comes with purpose. After Covid – and no doubt after Labour’s permissive regime – we will need to do it all again.
Second: this is about purpose not process. In the later stages of our own government, we sometimes made the Labour mistake. Our process focussed on money and targets not outcomes – the purpose the money was spent – and sometimes actions were distorted to meet targets and not deliver results.
Sometimes, more police officers were recruited to meet the targets, but some warranted officers were put into roles better and more cheaply done by civilians. And we could have looked at the purpose more clearly – if you want to cut crime, investing in prisons to lock up persistent and violent offenders for longer is just as important and sometimes more important than having the officers there to arrest them.
Third: Money matters, but it isn’t everything. Sometimes we do need to spend more but we have to spend better. On defence, on an ageing and a growing population, and on healthcare, on social care and on pensions. But we need reform to make sure the money goes further – in defence procurement, in social care services, through capital investment and tech, and more, we need to change how we spend and where.
This is the tragic failure of Labour’s public pay policy – it will cost us billions, and it will do nothing – absolutely nothing – to improve public sector productivity because they didn’t negotiate, they capitulated.
Fourth: it’s all connected. Health spending can’t outrun social care and prisoner rehabilitation won’t work if you don’t get probation right. And anyone promising to reduce migration without encouraging automation, reforming welfare, changing higher education, and getting skills and training policy right just can’t deliver.
Fifth: trust the professionals. That’s the key lesson of school reform. But that trust must be accompanied by accountability so that parents know what works and what doesn’t and it must be accompanied by learning from others – we know synthetic phonics and maths in primary schools work for everyone and the lessons should be applied across the board. We cannot see some kids failed because of bureaucratic second-guessing, or civil service units dictating what happens on the ground when teachers know that discipline and standards are key.
Sixth: it’s about people. Tony Hudgell wasn’t interested in who organised the care he got, he just needed the love a child deserves. His foster parents – those who showed him love and love him still – took him in and the doctors and nurses who treated him showed him every human care.
Of course, structures matter. Especially in the NHS and in care, where we need to balance the necessity for economies of scale with local needs and find the best ways to hold the services to account.
But those best placed to recognise Tony’s needs, and his family’s, know them as people, as individuals with personal needs. That means decentralisation, but decentralisation must come with regional, specialist capabilities and huge improvements in technology and the transparency to make accountability real.
Patients are too often trapped in Byzantine processes and guarded legalism. We must remember the humanity of care that professionals know matters most.
And seventh: demand matters. Failing services create more demand. Too much time spent out of work makes it harder to get a new job. A missed diagnosis of dyslexia can see a young man struggling at school and more likely to get sucked into crime. Poor diets and a lack of screening make health problems more expensive to fix later.
These principles apply across the board and are all based on recognising the need to invest, to reform and to protect.
Investing in people and ideas. Reforming to drive efficiency. Protecting the services we need and the communities we love.
I have covered a lot of ground today, and I’ve deliberately talked in terms of principles more than policies, because following our election defeat my party has a lot of listening to do – and the hard work of change ahead. And we have four years to think and deliver a plan for the future.
But when we, the Conservatives, have been at our best, we have provided answers to the questions that the country needs on public services. From Kenneth Baker to Michael Gove with schools, from Michael Howard on policing to Iain Duncan Smith on welfare. And of course, Keith Joseph on redrawing the boundary of the state and society so that people are not subservient to the government.
We know that the country depends on vital public services, and we know that getting this right is vital to social and economic reform.
Just as you can’t fund good public services without a strong economy, you can’t have a competitive economy without skills and training, or with soaring welfare costs and an unhealthy population.
With state spending now at 45 percent of GDP we can’t afford to keep paying the avoidable costs of failure. And deep down, we all know you can’t keep spending and pretending that there’s no limit to taxation. We can’t go on with costs rising faster than economic growth.
But most of all, services matter because they are about how we care for eachother. And if I’m honest, in the later stages of the last Conservative government, we lost the appetite for reform and improvement.
And already we have seen enough of Labour – the old statist, centralising tendency, in hock to the unions, tax-and-spend – don’t-ask-the-difficult-questions – to know that they have no interest in the hard work that even Blair’s Government recognised they needed to do to deliver and instead they want to drag us back to the Britain of the 1970s.
So in a few years’ time, it will come to us, the Conservative Party, to provide the answers to how we train up our people, how we care for our elderly, how we heal the sick and protect the decent and the vulnerable from the criminal and the violent.
We have done it before and we must do it again. In Westminster, and with our colleagues working in Cardiff Bay, in Stormont, and in Holyrood, we need to do it again.
The challenges we face this time are different – and perhaps more complex and more urgent than before. But I know, listening well, and thinking hard, and applying our values – of family and society, of responsibility and commitment, of trusting the people – we will succeed and provide our children and grandchildren with a secure foundation for this country’s future.
As Conservatives, we cannot afford to be complacent or to allow our society to drift back to the 70s. Our task is to offer a compelling vision of the future. One that is rightly filled with the hope and aspiration of generations to come. That asks each of us to do our best, to serve, to lead and to act in the interests of the country.
It is that hope that averted and arrested the socialism of the past, that told us our fate was not inevitable decline. Today, we face that same challenge and that same choice.
If we stand idle and look inwards while the policies of this Labour government go unchecked and unchallenged, we are aiding the socialist project.
We need to show confidence and hope that is at the core of our Conservative philosophy and puts the family and society at the heart of our political mission and purpose.
This government has had a shaky start and is grinding the gears into reverse. But, that won’t change. It lacks a coherent vision of the future and is just playing tactics to appease the factions within its own party.
Sir Keir is not offering hope, but excuses. This feels more like an opposition than an administration.
What we choose to do will determine how long we watch Labour charting this course of decline and how long we will be unable to stop it.
Our choice, the choice that we must make over the coming months, is to choose to show that government is about people, about purpose, and mission. But fundamentally, it’s about hope.
Thank you.
