Chancellor Rachel Reeves is seeking to trim £2 billion from the government’s £13 billion administration budget, with up to 50,000 jobs being cut in her Spring Statement. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government was ‘looking across the board’ for savings. But do Reeves and Starmer really have the courage, and the political capital, to carry out such a purge?
On paper, Labour’s task looks straightforward enough. Civil service numbers over the past 15 years have performed a bungee jump. Between 2010 and 2016, the coalition, followed by David Cameron’s majority Conservative government, succeeded in trimming civil service numbers from 492,000 to 384,000. Then they began to climb again, firstly in response to the Brexit negotiations and then thanks to Covid. Numbers then continued to climb, hitting 515,000 by last autumn.
It is little wonder that civil servants think they can do their jobs in four days a week rather than five: their numbers have climbed by a third in little more than a decade, without any obvious need for the extra staff.
Even so, Reeves’ task might turn out to be a little more difficult than many people imagine. While it is tempting to imagine that there are half a million ‘pen-pushers’ idling away in Whitehall – a view encouraged by the Prime Minister’s talk of shifting resources to ‘front line services – the reality is a bit different. Among the 515,000 workers counted as civil servants are many who do, in fact, have front line roles. The figure includes, for example, 23,000 prison officers, 16,000 probation officers and 10,000 Border Force officers. While there might be limited sympathy for the Sir Humphreys forced to take an early gold watch, it tends to be rather popular with the public when governments beef up the number of Border Office staff to tackle illegal migration (not that it seems to make much difference how many there are, given that illegal migrants are able to play the immigration courts to their advantage, and Border Office patrols are forbidden to return illegal arrivals to France anyway).
That said, it is hard to argue that there are not vast folds of fat to be trimmed. Many public services over the past 15 years have been shifted online – such as applying for a passport or renewing a car tax disc. Surely, this ought to have made large numbers of staff superfluous, just as technology has made many private sector jobs obsolete. So don’t expect AI necessarily to lead to greater government efficiency, as Keir Starmer has promised. It is going to take political determination to cut numbers, together with a huge shift in culture. There will have to be no more talk of four day weeks.
Jeremy Hunt told us in 2023 that he was putting an immediate cap on civil service numbers. Instead, they kept on growing. Why could he, as Chancellor, not achieve what the coalition (in which he served as health secretary) managed to do a decade earlier? Somehow, the Conservatives lost the will to take the political flak they faced during the coalition years. Rachel Reeves must mean what she says on Wednesday, when she unveils her Spring Statement, if she is going to do any better.
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