There appears to be confusion at the top of government over proposed cuts to the civil service, as a minister has insisted there are no targets for redundancies – despite the chancellor saying just one day earlier that 10,000 jobs would be lost.
Rachel Reeves has ordered mandarins to slash 15 per cent from departmental administrative budgets by 2029-30 – saving an estimated £2.2bn a year – and pledged that the money will be redirected to “frontline” services.
Over the weekend, when pressed on the number of jobs that could be cut, Ms Reeves told Sky News: “I’m confident that we can reduce civil service numbers by 10,000. And during Covid, there were big increases in the number of people that were working in the civil service.
“That was the right thing to do to respond to those challenges. But it’s not right that we just keep those numbers there for ever.”
But pressed on the same matter on Monday, transport secretary Heidi Alexander said the government is “not setting a target”.
She told Times Radio: “We have made a commitment to reduce the administrative costs of the civil service by 15 per cent over the next five years. We haven’t set any headcount reduction targets on that.”
Asked how many jobs will be lost, Ms Alexander replied: “We’re not setting a target. Boris Johnson did that, and said that he wanted to reduce the number of people working in the civil service, and the numbers went up by 130,000.
“What we want to do is make this state more agile. We do think it should be leaner, and we think we can make better use of technology, AI, in how we provide public services. That is true for central government departments as much as it’s true for other parts of the public service.”
Civil service unions have warned that as many as 50,000 people could lose their jobs, and that vital services could deteriorate as a result of the cuts.
The general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, Fran Heathcote, warned that former prime minister Gordon Brown had attempted to cut backroom civil service staff and that the “consequences of that was chaos”.
It comes as the government gears up to make a number of spending cuts to ministerial departments as it attempts to balance the books at the spring statement on Wednesday.
The chancellor has repeatedly said she will not budge from her fiscal rules, which preclude borrowing to fund day-to-day spending. This has led to mounting pressure on Labour over how it will pay for its plans – by raising taxes or cutting spending – amid disappointing growth figures and higher-than-expected borrowing.
The government has already announced a swathe of cuts to the welfare bill, which are expected largely to hit disabled people.
Asked by BBC Radio 5 live if cuts would be announced for departments whose spending is not protected, such as the Ministry of Justice, the prime minister said ministers are “looking across the board” at spending, and that he wants to “take some money out of government”.
“At the Budget last year we made some record investments, and we’re not going to undo that,” he added.
Sir Keir pointed to investment in the NHS since Labour’s first Budget in October, which he said had “just delivered five months’ worth of waiting lists coming down, five months in a row during the winter”.
The PM added: “So we’re not going to alter the basics, but we are going to look across, and one of the areas that we will be looking at is ‘Can we run the government more efficiently? Can we take some money out of government?’
“And I think we can. I think we’re essentially asking businesses across the country to be more efficient, to look at AI and tech in the way that they do their business. I want the same challenge in government, which is ‘Why shouldn’t we be more efficient?’”
The Treasury has been contacted for comment.
