Civil servants’ unions have accused Rishi Sunak of scapegoating his own workforce after the prime minister, after being briefed, claimed that public service job cuts would be used to fund a pledge to increase defence spending.
After Sunak announced plans to increase defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade, the Treasury confirmed this would be partly funded by money saved through plans to cut the civil service workforce by more than 70,000 people.
Following the announcement, critics pointed out that the total payroll of the civil service is around £14bn a year, making it unlikely that even deep cuts would be able to make a dent in the extra £75bn the government plans to spend on defence over the next six years.
Alex Thomas, Institute of Government Program Director fired the suggestion as “not serious”.
“If the government is relying on civil service efficiency and cuts to fund this amount of new defence spending, then that completely lacks credibility,” he said.
Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the PCS union, said the decision to use civil service cuts to redirect money to the defence budget – reported to national newspapers yesterday – showed that “once again ministers shamefully see fit to scapegoat their own workforce”.
“It is not fair that our members should pay for increased defence spending with their jobs, so we will fight these proposals tooth and nail, just as we fought them under Boris Johnson,” she said.
The total number of civil servants has increased steadily in recent years, despite repeated promises by ministers to reduce it.
In May 2022, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced plans to cut 91,000 jobs to return to pre-Brexit employment numbers, but Rishi Sunak left politics when he was elected Prime Minister in October of that year.
Sunak, who set a different staff reduction target as chancellor a year before Johnson’s, said he did not believe “top-down targets for staff reductions across the civil service” were the right strategy when he became prime minister in October 2022. Instead, he called on all departments to “look at the most effective ways to secure value and maximise efficiency within budgets”.
In October, his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced a cap on civil service numbers and said the government would reduce staffing levels to pre-pandemic levels. In last year’s Autumn Statement, he confirmed that departments would be asked to draw up plans to reduce jobs to pre-pandemic levels before the end of the next spending review period, with the aim of reversing the rise in staff numbers to 66,000.
The civil service has continued to grow in the months since Hunt’s announcement, bringing the number of jobs to be cut to around 72,000.
But Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, said that despite this growth, many parts of the civil service “are already on the brink of collapse and further cuts will make it impossible for them to meet their obligations”.
“The main drivers of staffing increases in recent years have been the additional workload of taking on roles previously undertaken at a European level and the huge pressure on frontline service delivery in areas such as the Prison Service. Meanwhile, many lesser-known but vital agencies for the UK’s security and prosperity are severely understaffed and struggling to recruit or retain the specialist skills they need,” he said.
“Even ignoring other essential services, non-military personnel of the Ministry of Defense are vital to the functioning of the Armed Forces,” he said.
“There is no point in having an Armed Forces prepared for war if the rest of the public sector is crumbling before our eyes.”
Speaking to ITV News this morning, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said ministers wanted “people on the frontline… rather than large swathes of people in the more menial jobs, the more administrative jobs, including the fact that there happen to be 72,000 more civil servants now than there were before Covid”.
“We’ve had a massive expansion and we just want to get back to where we were so we can operate more efficiently and effectively,” he said.
Asked whether the government was being “casual” by having 72,000 more staff than necessary, or whether they were in fact doing “very important work” including implementing Brexit, Shapps once again attributed the expansion to the pandemic response.
“What we are saying is that we believe that a new, modern civil service would function using more technology, more artificial intelligence,” he added.
He said he was “confident” the cuts would not leave thousands of former civil servants out of work because there would be jobs available in other areas of the economy, “given that there are so many people chasing every job at the moment.”
“It’s just that we don’t think it makes sense to have a civil service that keeps growing and growing and growing, even though the challenges of things like Covid have now partially taken a backseat,” he added.
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