MPs have continued to give their response to the chancellor’s Budget statement amid claims Gordon Brown has stolen the Tories' central plank of policy.

Speaking in the Commons for the last day of Budget debate, senior Tory Edward Leigh said attacking waste in government had become the "battleground of politics".

Leigh, the chairman of the public accounts committee, listed a series of multi-million failures to combat waste and inefficiency.

He called on departments to be subjected to performance incentives.

And he pressed the case for a system of league tables and open scrutiny of the running of departments.

Leigh warned that many civil servants had "never run a project in their entire lives".

Savings

Conservative frontbencher David Willetts accused Gordon Brown of a failed bid to outmanoeuvre his own party’s plans to reduce Whitehall spending.

He told MPs that the chancellor had been promising savings since he entered Downing Street.

"Why should we believe that this time is going to be any different," he said.

Liberal Democrat welfare spokesman Steve Webb mocked the £100 payout to the over 70s.

"What we had was a rabbit from a hat instead of a serious form of local taxation," he said.

But pensions secretary Andrew Smith contrasted Labour’s management of the economy with the "return to boom and bust" under the Conservatives.

He said Labour offered "continued investment and reform in public services or cuts in public spending''.

Smith went on to defend his decision to cut 30,000 jobs from the Department of Work and Pensions.

He said the move would create a "leaner, more effective" organisation with "a better service to the public and better value to
the taxpayer".

The focus on Wednesday turns to the chancellor, who faces MPs on the Treasury committee for a grilling over his Budget plans.