Liz Truss has demanded answers from the cabinet secretary over why references to her administration were included in a briefing paper published alongside Wednesday’s King’s Speech.
Cabinet secretary Simon Case ordered the removal of the material after the former prime minister wrote to him complaining that the references to her infamous mini-budget as "disastrous" were "a flagrant breach of the civil service code".
The contentious words appeared in a section of the briefing paper relating to the government’s Budget Responsibility Bill.
The original version stated the bill’s “fiscal lock” would “ensure that the mistakes of Liz Truss ‘mini-budget’ cannot be repeated”.
Officials have also deleted a sentence in a section of the bill titled "Key Facts" which said: “The ‘fiscal lock’ is intended to capture and prevent those announcements that could resemble the disastrous Liz Truss ‘mini-budget’, announced on 23 September 2022, which would have cost £48 billion per year by 2027/28, and was not subject to an OBR forecast and damaged Britain’s credibility with international lenders.”
A sentence which quotes the Institute for Government as saying that “Rachel Reeves has made welcome moves to improve fiscal policy making; Liz Truss's autumn mini-budget is a lesson in how not to do fiscal policy” has also been removed by officials.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said the cabinet secretary "has responded to Liz Truss and directed for these references to be removed from the document".
"They have now been corrected and updated," the spokesperson added.
Truss published another letter to Case this afternoon, in which she asks the cab sec to confirm “how such material came to be included in the document in the first place and how those responsible will be held to account”.
The new letter asks Case if he has launched an investigation, for the name of the senior civil servant who signed off the document, and to confirm whether there was a breach of the civil service code. It also seeks the names of any ministers or special advisers involved in drafting or signing off the document and asks Case to "recover and pulp" physical copies.
In her initial letter, Truss said “such personal and political attacks have no place in a document prepared by civil servants – an error made all the more egregious when the attack is allow to masquerade in the document among ‘key facts’”.
She urged the cabinet secretary to “urgently investigate how such material came to be included” in the document, to “ensure suitable admonishment for those responsible” and to immediately remove the “political material”.
The civil service code says civil servants “must not use official resources for party political purposes”. Additional guidance on government communication states that it should be "objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical".
Alex Thomas, a programme director at the IfG who leads the think tank's work on the civil service and policymaking, said: “It was right that the reference was removed. All government communications are supposed to be objective and not polemical. Naming a former PM and criticising her government's policies looks like making a political argument – and so fails that test. Ministers should make these arguments in parliament and in public, not through official documents."
Truss’s mini-budget, a £45bn package of unfunded tax cuts which came without an OBR forecast, spooked markets and prompted a spike in the cost of government borrowing, leading to her resignation after just 49 days in power.
The bill containing the now-deleted references to the mini-budget says it will introduce a “fiscal lock” that ensures that all significant tax and spending changes must be subject to an independent assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility. This aims to “prevent significant uncosted measures from being announced without sufficient scrutiny to mitigate the impact on the public finances”.