Conservatives unveil £47 billion of savings to restore country’s public finances

Today [Monday 6^th October 2025] the Conservative Party is setting out significant proposals to overhaul the public finances and protect taxpayers to ensure the country lives within our means.

In a major speech, Shadow Chancellor Sir Mel Stride MP will recommit the Conservative Party to fiscal responsibility – and lay out a significant package of £47 billion savings for the public purse. 

These savings will be delivered through tackling the spiralling welfare bill, cutting the bloated Civil Service and reducing foreign aid expenditure – delivering a stronger economy for the country. 

On welfare we will replace the broken system of sickness benefits with one that properly targets help to those who need it most.  

That will include stopping claims for people with low level mental health problems because what is really needed is treatment and support, not cash.  

We will also ensure that only British citizens can access welfare – ensuring that citizenship of this country means something.  

The Conservative Party are also committing to reversing any lifting of the two-child benefit cap.  

Our measures will bring the welfare bill down by £23 billion.

We will also take significant steps to reform the Civil Service. 

There were 384,000 civil servants in 2016, but today that number has risen to a staggering 517,000.  

This is unsustainable, so the Conservative Party will bring those numbers back down to 2016 level: a measure that will save one pound in every four spent.  

This will represent a saving of £8 billion 

The Conservatives will also deliver serious cuts to the overseas aid budget because we cannot justify taxing people in this country to pay for billions of spending abroad. This will save nearly £7 billion.

Additionally, the Conservatives will deliver significant savings through its BORDERS plan, which will end the asylum hotel scandal by removing all those who arrive illegally and save at least £3.5 billion. By ensuring that benefits and social housing are for UK nationals we will free up nearly £4 billion of council housing subsidy.

Finally, the Conservatives will scrap the costly and ineffective green subsidies being pushed by Ed Miliband, freeing the taxpayer and the public finances from his eco-experimentation and Net Zero by 2050 zealotry. 

Combined these measures will save the country £47 billion – demonstrating that under Kemi Badenoch's leadership the Conservatives stand for fiscal responsibility and are actively pursuing lowering the debt burden to leave a better financial legacy for future generations. 

In his speech, Sir Mel Stride MP is expected to say: 

“The Conservative Party will never, ever make fiscal commitments without spelling out exactly how they will be paid for.

“We're the only party that gets it. The only party that will stand up for fiscal responsibility. We must get on top of government spending.

“We cannot deliver stability unless we live within our means. No more pretending we can keep spending money we simply do not have.” 

ENDS 

Notes to Editors

Government spending is too high and taxpayers are not getting value for money:

• Government spending is too high and there is too much waste. From 1989-90 to 2007-08, Total Managed Expenditure (TME) increased from 34.4 per cent of GDP to 40.3 per cent of GDP, averaging 37.2 per cent of GDP. Under Labour's plans, TME is projected to reach 45 per cent of GDP in 2025-26 –  the highest level seen outside the pandemic since 2010. Additionally, examples of wasteful spending abound, from abuse of the benefits system to the Prime Minister's shameful Chagos deal (OBR, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, 26 March 2025, link; HM Treasury, Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2025, 10 July 2025, link). 

• This means higher taxes… After Rachel Reeves increased taxes by £40 billion a year in her first budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said taxes would rise from 35.3 per cent of GDP to a ‘historic high' of 37.7 per cent in 2027-28, the highest level since 1948 (OBR, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, 26 March 2025, link; OBR, Supporting Documents: March 2024 Economic and Fiscal Outlook – charts and tables: Chapter 4, 6 March 2024, link).

• … and higher debt. Despite promising not to ‘fiddle the figures', Rachel Reeves changed the fiscal rules, increasing Public Sector Net Debt to 96.4 per cent – levels of debt not seen since the early 1960s, when Britain was repaying war debts, or during the peak of the pandemic. PSND is now almost three times higher than in 2007-08, when it stood at 35.6 per cent of GDP before the financial crash (ONS, Public Sector Finances, 19 September 2025, link; OBR, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, 26 March 2025, link; HM Treasury, Autumn Budget 2024, 30 October 2024, link; Bloomberg, November 2023, link; Philip Aldrick, Twitter, 3 August 2024, link; OBR, Historical official forecasts database, 3 April 2025, link).

• Taxpayers are not getting value for money.  Over the two decades prior to the start of the pandemic, public services productivity increased by 0.2% a year, compared to equivalent private sector productivity growth of 0.8% a year.  While this was better under the Conservatives (0.9% a year from 2011-2019) compared to Labour (-0.2% from 1998-2010) public services need to become more efficient. (ONS, Public service productivity estimates: total public service, 27 March 2024, link; ONS, Multi-factor productivity estimates, 7^th April 2022, link)

The country's public finances need careful and responsible management. That is why, under new leadership, the Conservatives would:

• Deliver a package of savings worth £47 billion over the next Parliament. At least half of these savings would go towards cutting government borrowing, moving the country closer to living within its means. This package includes:

• We would make savings from the non-nuclear elements of Ed Miliband's “Great British Energy”. (£450m pa); cut heat pump subsidies (£300m pa); electric vehicle grant subsidies (£350m pa) and make savings on Labour's “Warm Homes Scheme” (£500m pa). This would save £1.6 billion a year.

Labour would keep spending money we simply do not have. As the Autumn Budget approaches, Labour are preparing to:

• Break their promise to ‘not [come] back with more borrowing or more taxes'. Speaking to business leaders after the Budget, Rachel Reeves said: ‘I'm really clear, I'm not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes'. However, when later asked to rule out tax rises, she said: ‘I'm not going to, because it would be irresponsible for a Chancellor to do that (BBC News, 25 November 2024, link; The Guardian, 4 July 2025, link).

• Continue to cave to backbench demands for ever-higher spending. After Keir Starmer refused to stand up to his party's calls for more tax, more spending and more debt at Labour Conference, Rachel Reeves was forced to brief plans to lift the two-child limit in the Budget (The Guardian, 30 September 2025, link).

• Increase the deficit, leaving the UK vulnerable to rising borrowing costs. Rachel Reeves' existing plans would increase public sector net borrowing by £36 billion to £70.6 billion – doubling the deficit and leaving the UK vulnerable to rising borrowing costs which recently reached their highest level since 1998 (OBR, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, 26 March 2025, link; Market Watch, 30 Year Gilt, accessed 3 September 2025).

Reform UK's plans are just as reckless. Reform would: 

• Push left-wing, Labour-style policies that would increase the size of the state. Reform's policies include spending hundreds of billions nationalising utility firms, charging taxes on online shopping, and hiking National Insurance on businesses (Reform UK, Our Contract with You, 17 June 2024, link; Sky News, 30 May 2024, link; Zia Yusuf, Twitter, 21 December 2024, link; The Guardian, 13 February 2025, link).

• Abolish the two-child benefit cap, driving up welfare spending. Reform UK claim removing the cap is ‘the right thing to do', a policy the Resolution Foundation estimates would cost £3.5 billion a year by 2029–30 (Reform UK Press Conference, 27 May 2025, archived; The Resolution Foundation, Press Release, 12 May 2025, link).