Jeremy Corbyn will seek to exploit the anti-austerity mood in the new House of Commons and put pressure on Conservative MPs by tabling an amendment to the Queen’s speech calling for the public sector pay cap to be scrapped.

Many public sector workers have seen their real living standards fall as a result of the 1% a year ceiling imposed by George Osborne in 2012 after two years of freezes, and rolled over for another four years in 2015.

Theresa May was confronted about the issue by an angry nurse during the BBC’s election debate, underlining public frustration about the ongoing squeeze, almost a decade after the financial crash.

Labour will table an amendment on Wednesday evening calling for cuts to emergency services, including the police and the fire service, to be reversed, and calling for an end to the 1% cap.

Conservative MPs are unlikely to back an amendment tabled by Corbyn. But Labour hopes the move will leave Tory backbenchers in marginal seats exposed to the argument that they back austerity if another election is called in the coming months.

Corbyn said: “You can’t have safety and security on the cheap. It is plain to see that seven years of cuts to our emergency services has made us less safe. It’s time to make a change.”

Corbyn has chosen not to focus on Brexit in his amendment and will not make it the central thrust of a second amendment to be tabled on Thursday, before MPs are given the opportunity to vote on the Queens speech – the Democratic Unionist party’s first chance to deliver on the confidence and supply deal.

A Conservative party spokesman said: “We’ve protected the police budget since 2015 while Labour wanted to cut it by 10% – and the number of fire incidents has halved in the last decade.

“We have also given the police and intelligence agencies the powers they need to respond to increased threats and keep people safe.”

A separate cross-party backbench amendment, tabled by Labour MPs including Stephen Doughty and Chuka Umunna, urges the government to seek to remain inside the single market after Brexit.

It has received the support of more than 50 MPs, leading its backers to hope that the Speaker will select it for the House to vote on Thursday and that some Tory MPs could lend it their support.



But Labour frontbenchers are sceptical of the wisdom of reopening the bitter debate that raged in the party earlier this year over how to handle the issue of Brexit. Corbyn imposed a three-line whip on his MPs to support the government’s article 50 bill, prompting several shadow ministers to resign.

Doughty, the MP for Cardiff South, said he was not expecting to win the vote but wanted to put the government on notice for the tough parliamentary battles ahead, with eight Brexit bills due during this two-year parliamentary session.

“It’s about putting a flag in the ground – things have changed. People are prepared to act cross-party,” he said.

Conservative MPs who have expressed concerns about the impact of spending cuts in key policy areas have returned to Westminster emboldened by the tight election result, which saw intense public debate about a lack of funding for public services.

The £1bn price tag for Theresa May’s confidence and supply deal with the DUP has also raised fresh questions about the government’s argument that there was “no magic money tree”.

Heidi Allen, the South Cambridgeshire MP who has campaigned in the past against benefits cuts, tweeted that she hoped other areas of public investment would be reviewed in the light of the extra cash found for Northern Ireland.

New DUP cash must surely mean funding will be urgently reviewed for pub sector wages, schools, social care, Univ Credit across whole UK too? — Heidi Allen (@heidiallen75) June 27, 2017

Dan Poulter, the MP for Central Suffolk, said he did not see the DUP deal and the need for more investment in public services as being linked, but he added: “I have long advocated the need to invest more in our public services, and also to end the public sector pay cap.”

Several Conservative MPs used the debate on the education aspects of the Queen’s speech on Tuesday to demand that the government urgently address the issue of school funding.

The education secretary, Justine Greening, reaffirmed the party’s manifesto pledge that no school would be left worse off in cash terms as a result of the new schools funding formula currently being consulted on.

But it is unclear where the £4bn in extra funding that the Conservatives pledged will come from, since the Tory manifesto aimed to find most of it from scrapping free school lunches – a policy now jettisoned.

Tory MP Tim Loughton, who represents East Worthing and Shoreham, said even that would not be enough.

“I welcome the additional £4bn that the government has offered, but there will still be a shortfall given the cost pressures coming along the line from pay increases, national insurance and the apprenticeship levy,” he said.

“The cumulative effect of being underfunded for so many years in West Sussex is that many of our schools do not have any further slack that they can take up – they are running on empty. That has to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.”

Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, pointed out that the extra £50m for schools included in the DUP funding package amounted to £150 for every pupil in Northern Ireland.

“Fortunately for them, they seem to have located the magic money tree about which we heard so much during the election,” she said.

“Of course I welcome the government’s acknowledgement that they were not properly funding schools in Northern Ireland, and the money is to address that; but can the secretary of state explain why, as schools face billions of pounds in cuts, the government are doing nothing to address the immediate pressures on schools in England?”

The DUP deal continued to arouse anger in Scotland and Wales. Labour’s Vaughan Gething, health secretary in the Welsh assembly, said: “Yesterday, the UK government found more than £1bn to effectively end austerity in Northern Ireland.

“I fully expect them to make money available so that we can give our hardworking health service staff the pay rise they deserve. They deserve nothing less.”