The Conservatives have pledged to slash Labour's culture of "big government".

Shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin said on Tuesday that Gordon Brown has presided over an overly bureaucratic public sector in his time at the Treasury, which the Tories would seek to redress in power.

Along with shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley, Letwin revealed that the Conservative-commissioned James review has identified £1.725 billion of savings that could be made from cutting NHS red tape.

The shadow Cabinet members accused Labour of installing too many layers of decision making, including primary care trusts, strategic health authorities and the size of the Department of Health itself.

Letwin promised that all of these would be cut under a Tory government with the money ploughed back into frontline services or offered to voters as tax cuts.

"We need to cut away layer after layer of unnecessary government activity, and layer after layer of unnecessary bureaucracy," he said.

Lansley added: "Our policy will mean the NHS is concerned with the needs of patients, not the requirements of government targets. The result is not only better for patients and practitioners, it delivers extra resources to frontline care for patients."

'Big government'

In a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies on Tuesday, Letwin also slammed the chancellor's tenure at the Treasury as a waste of resources of benign economic conditions.

Ahead of the government's comprehensive spending review next week, he argued that Brown's statement would be "a plan for big spending, big borrowing and big taxes".

"Bureaucracy, once unleashed, creates bureaucracy," the shadow chancellor said.

"The result of this vicious circle is increasing cost for the taxpayer and decreasing efficiency in our public services as much as in our businesses."
 
"The big government that feeds on its own spawn is a sea-creature that also entraps the citizen, renders the citizen increasingly dependent, constrains the citizen's choices, disempowers the citizen," he added.

Letwin said the Tory plans to cut the size of the state are sustainable without cutting key spending.

"For the very same reasons that Brown's big government yields the 'double whammy' of big taxes and failure to improve the public services, our smaller government can achieve the golden combination of lower taxes and better services," he said.

"By cutting away layers of regulation, initiatives, targets, inspectors, specific grants, czars, units, boards, and panels, by removing complex and intrusive taxes, by lifting pensioners out of means-testing – by doing these things we can make government substantially smaller and cheaper," the shadow chancellor added.

"We can radically reduce the size of the bureaucracy and cost of government, without taking a single penny away from front-line services."

'Massive cuts'

Responding the the Conservative announcement, Labour said the plans would result in "massive cuts in public services".

"Oliver Letwin has let the cat out of the bag. It is not just government bureaucracy that Mr Letwin wants to cut, but government activity," said Treasury minister Ruth Kelly.

"They are committed to cutting an immediate £18 billion from vital public services, but we now know that is just the first step and that they want their cuts to go much further and much deeper.

"Their plans would mean deep cuts in defence, law and order, transport, skills, science and overseas aid.

"On top of that they want to take money from local schools and from the NHS which serves everyone to subsidise treatment in the private sector for just a few."