Tory MP urges sacking of 'inept' civil servants

CIVIL SERVANTS at the Treasury should be made to feel the pain of the Government's economic policies like the small businesses who were going bust, a backbench Conservative MP suggested yesterday.

Teresa Gorman, MP for Billericay, said one civil servant should be sacked for every business that went bankrupt.

Mrs Gorman is well known for her outspoken, Thatcherite views. She also represents the next door constituency to Basildon, regarded as the capital of Essex Man, who rejected Labour at the last election. 'The sackings should start at the top at permanent secretary level,' she said.

Her proposal for the 'economically inept' mandarins at the Treasury, taking collective responsibility to new extremes, was seen as a thinly veiled attack on Norman Lamont, the Chancellor, who once described unemployment as the price worth paying for the fight against inflation.

Working-class Tories in Conservative constituencies like Billericay are lining up to give Mr Lamont the benefit of their advice at the Conservative Party's annual conference in Brighton.

'It is Treasury advice that is causing severe problems for millions of people in this country and the civil servants should get to know what these problems are like,' Mrs Gorman said.

'If they are too thick to learn then they are in the wrong job.

'It is a serious problem for our country that financial decisions affecting every business, every job and every mortgage payer are in the hands of those who are economically inept.'

Mr Lamont's predecessor, Lord Lawson of Blaby, formerly Nigel Lawson, has had to cut the price of his house, the Old Rectory at Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire, by nearly pounds 100,000 to pounds 239,000 to find a buyer in the depressed housing market.

Making ministers and their officials feel the pain they inflict on the world outside Whitehall is unlikely to win support within the Government. It could prove impossible to implement. The number of businesses which have gone bankrupt exceeds the number of civil servants at the Treasury.