Shadow chancellor Michael Howard

The Conservatives have committed themselves to tax cuts and higher state pensions.

Ahead of their annual party conference in Blackpool this week, party spokesmen outlined key new policy announcements to be unveiled this week.

Under a Conservative government the basic state pension would be increased by £7 per week, in line with average earnings as opposed to inflation, and the tax burden cut.

Party leader Iain Duncan Smith said the initiatives would promote "fairness for all" and end Labour's "degrading" means testing of pensioners' incomes.

Speaking on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme on Sunday, Duncan Smith accused the government of going on a "huge spending spree".

As yet unspecified tax cuts could be paid for by reducing Whitehall bureaucracy. he argued.

Ministers had increased the cost of running central government by £5.7 billion and raised the number of civil servants in the Home Office alone by 10,000 he claimed.

"They are wasting vast sums of money," he told the programme. "Taxpayers don't mind paying tax. What they mind is paying hard-earned money which is then wasted."

Shadow chancellor Michael Howard appeared to be less committed to the plan however. He said while he hoped to cut taxes, he could not guarantee to do so.

Howard claimed the pledge was to "make a promise next year".

But Duncan Smith dismissed Labour claims of a split, insisting both he and Howard were planning tax cuts.

"Both of us have said categorically that we plan to cut taxes after the next election," he said.

"What we are saying is that after the chancellor's spending review and the chancellor's Budget, we will bring forward those plans in detail."

The pensions promise would cost £7 billion per year and be paid for by scrapping welfare programmes such as the New Deal for the unemployed and through the phasing out of Labour's pensions credit system.

Work and pensions spokesman David Willetts said the move would increase the average single pensioner's weekly income by £7 and that of couples by £11 above inflation by the end of the Tories' first term in power.

It would lift one million pensioners out of means-testing, and increase the basic weekly pension from £77.45 a week to £92.40 within four years, he said.

No pensioners would lose out from his plans, and many would gain, said Willetts added.

The changes would also encourage workers to save for their old age.

"The next Conservative government will increase the value of the basic state pension by earnings rather than prices in order to reduce the number of pensioners subject to means testing," he said.

"We need to float pensioners off means-testing so that a pound of savings equals a pound extra of income.

"That way we can start shifting the balance of pensioners' incomes away from state benefits and towards funded savings."

But Work and Pensions Secretary Andrew Smith told Sky News' Sunday with Adam Boulton programme that "the Tory sums simply don't add up".

"They've made the classic budgeting mistake of imagining you can go on providing extra money year-on-year by scrapping a programme which only gives a flat forward expenditure," he said.

And former shadow chancellor Francis Maude warned that the Conservatives may not be able to afford to reduce taxation during their first term in office.

Reform of public services should be the party's priority, he told GMTV's Sunday Programme. "That costs money in the short term and will make it more difficult in the short term - and I would say for the first parliament - to cut taxes," he said.