Howard: Public services will be our top priority

The Tories pledged on Thursday that they would give "overriding priority" to improving Britain's public services rather than tax cuts during their wholesale review of the party's policies.

Michael Howard, the shadow Chancellor, stepped up the Conservatives' campaign to regain the trust of voters in the party's commitment to public services after largely avoiding the issue during this year's general election campaign.

Mr Howard said: "Given the parlous state which the public services in this country are now in, that has to be our priority. This is literally a matter of life and death now. If you look at our National Health Service, people are dying in this country from illnesses they would not die of if they lived in other countries.

"Our overriding priority will be to do what we have to do in order to make people's lives better and that means giving the public services a top priority."

Denying that the Tories were dumping their ideological baggage, he said: "It is an entirely pragmatic response to the situation in which this country finds itself. We will have three more years of Labour government but there are no signs that our public services are improving; on the contrary, they are deteriorating."

Mr Howard suggested that the Tories had not abandoned their traditional commitment to tax cuts as a long-term goal. He said that countries which took a lower proportion of their national income in taxes had more dynamic and productive economies.

The Tories are only just beginning their policy review, but they have already said they may encourage better-off people to take out private health insurance. Mr Howard said the use of taxpayers' money was not the only way to make public services better.

He added that two myths about the NHS had now been exploded – that the service was the envy of the world and that its problems could be cured by a little bit more taxpayers' money.

Mr Howard and some of his shadow cabinet colleagues were launching a pre-emptive strike at the Government's economic strategy before the draft Budget to be presented by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, on Tuesday. They accused Mr Brown of imposing £10bn of extra taxes and red tape on business, and said that giving companies "one or two sops" would be greeted with hollow laughter.

But Andrew Smith, the Treasury Chief Secretary, insisted the Tories had not changed and were "just as extreme as before". He said Mr Howard was committed to deep cuts in public services because he had called for the share of national income devoted to public spending to be cut to 35 per cent. "This is the same old Tory party – completely negative, offering no answers and no positive proposals at all," he said.