Boris Johnson has demanded his cabinet comes up with a plan to cut about 90,000 civil service jobs to free up cash to tackle the cost of living. Sources said the PM wants staffing to return to 2016 levels in the coming years, cutting about one in five posts. Mr Johnson told the Daily Mail: “We have got to cut the cost of government to reduce the cost of living.” A civil service union said the “ill-thought-out” plan could affect services such as passport processing.
On an away day in Stoke-on-Trent on Thursday, the prime minister gave ministers a month to produce plans to drastically shrink the civil service, as the government comes under increasing pressure over the rising cost of living. There were 384,000 civil servants employed in 2016 – the lowest number since World War Two – but as the UK prepared to leave the EU numbers steadily rose until they reached 475,000 at the end of last year.
While large-scale job cuts are likely to take time, a government source said “instant savings” could be achieved by imposing a recruitment freeze in Whitehall and abolishing any vacancies which had not been signed off by a minister. But the source said there was no set target for redundancies.
The prime minister suggested to the Daily Mail that the savings could be used for tax cuts, saying: “Every pound the government pre-empts from the taxpayer is money they can spend on their own priorities, on their own lives.” But civil service union of the FDA said the expansion of Whitehall since 2016 had been necessary to tackle “two unprecedented events”, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.
FDA general secretary Dave Penman said the government could decide to cut the civil service back to 2016 levels, but he said it would also have to choose “what the reduced civil service will no longer have the capacity to do” which may affect services such as passports, border control or health. “Without an accompanying strategy, these cuts appear more like a continuation of the government’s civil service culture wars – or even worse, ill-thought-out, rushed job slashes that won’t lead to a more cost-effective government,” he said.
Major job reductions through natural wastage – waiting for people to resign or retire rather than enforcing redundancies – would take many years, Mr Penman warned. Labour accused the government of “pointless rhetoric and lack of action” instead of implementing an emergency budget to offer more support to people struggling with bills. But a government spokesperson said when people are facing rising costs, they “rightly expect their government to lead by example and run as efficiently as possible”.
