Sunday, August 04, 2024

Labour drops Tory plans to cut Civil Service numbers

Ben Riley-Smith
Sun, 4 August 2024 

Whitehall


The Government has quietly scrapped Tory plans to cut 66,000 Civil Service jobs.


In cuts announced in October 2023, Jeremy Hunt vowed to freeze numbers and eventually reduce them to pre-Covid pandemic levels.

But documents released by The Treasury last week confirmed the freeze had been abandoned alongside plans to reduce overall numbers.

The Civil Service headcount ballooned from about 380,000 before the Brexit vote in 2016 to around 480,000 at the start of 2023.

A Treasury insider defended the approach by noting that departments were still being asked to reduce administration budgets by 2 per cent, which could mean some job reductions.

Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to axe the planned cuts to the Civil Service came after he appointed Sue Gray, a former mandarin, as his all-powerful chief of staff.

Ms Gray was previously the second most senior official at the Cabinet Office, which is the government department responsible for overseeing Whitehall.

Sweeping powers over Labour policy

She was a controversial hire, having shot to prominence over her role in the Partygate investigation that brought down Boris Johnson.

Now she has sweeping powers over Labour policy and has surprised some within the party by actively lobbying for causes including the refurbishment of Casement Park.

But senior Tories criticised the decision. Mr Hunt said: “Labour is prioritising Whitehall over the taxpayer.

“We took the difficult decisions to cut the Civil Service headcount to 2019 levels to deliver important measures like increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent.

“But if even relatively obvious decisions like this are ducked then it is all too obvious why the Chancellor has to invent fictitious black holes to justify tax rises.”

The civil servant rise has been put down to expansions in government departments needed to deal with the negotiated departure from the EU and the challenges of the pandemic.

Mr Johnson first vowed to reduce the size of the Civil Service by a fifth in May 2022, meaning more than 90,000 jobs would need to go.
‘New policies should not always mean new people’

Mr Hunt, who was kept on as chancellor by Rishi Sunak, outlined his own plans in October 2023 at the Conservative Party conference.

He said then: “We have the best civil servants in the world and they saved many lives in the pandemic by working night and day.

“But even after that pandemic is over, we still have 66,000 more civil servants than before. New policies should not always mean new people.

“So today I’m freezing the expansion of the Civil Service and putting in place a plan to reduce its numbers to pre-pandemic levels. This will save £1 billion next year.

“And I won’t lift the freeze until we have a proper plan not just for the Civil Service but for all public sector productivity improvements.”

Last week Rachel Reeves, Mr Hunt’s successor, abandoned several Tory projects, claiming she had inherited a £22 billion “black hole” in spending plans.

A Treasury document giving more detail noted “the Civil Service headcount cap announced by the previous administration will be lifted”.

Sources also confirmed the job cuts plan had been dropped.
‘It’s a chumocracy’

Critics of the drive have long argued that no detailed explanation for how the cuts were to be implemented was ever announced by either Mr Johnson or Mr Hunt.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who as a Cabinet Office minister under Mr Johnson championed the cuts drive, was critical.

Sir Jacob said: “What has happened is the Labour Party has got in and shown itself to be a chumocracy.

“You take money from pensioners who vote Tory and you give it to public sector workers who you think are your voters and you want to employ even more of them. It’s pork barrel politics at its finest.”

A Treasury source defended the approach: “This Chancellor has already pressed Treasury officials time and time again to be driving efficiencies. It was one of the main things she focused on when she uncovered the £22 billion black hole and it led to the savings in the document.”

Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA which represents civil servants, said: “The previous government’s approach to setting a fixed headcount reduction was not only an intellectually bankrupt approach to driving efficiencies, but also led to perverse outcomes such as an increase in consultancy spend across the Civil Service.

“They were repeatedly advised that the approach was unworkable, but prioritised easy headlines over actual solutions.

“The Civil Service is a complex organisation of half a million staff in more than 250 diverse organisations. The idea you can dream up the perfect staffing level for 2029, simply based on what it was in 2019, demonstrates it was never about serious workforce management, or an attempt to match government commitments to the resources allocated by ministers.”

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