Boris Johnson’s civil service job cut is ambitious – and ideological
In Stoke on Thursday to discuss the cost of living crisis, Boris Johnson told his cabinet: “Guys, we’re going to get through this … job, job, job is the answer.” Hours later, it emerged that nearly one in five civil servants were bound to lose their lives.
Rishi Sunak’s spending review last October had already set a target of returning Whitehall staffing to 2019-20 levels – pre-pandemic levels – by 2025; But this new pledge will put the civil service back in pre-Brexit shape.
This is the only latest in a long line of efficiency drives aimed at reducing Whitehall. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown commissioned businessman Sir Peter Gershon to recommend ways to reduce the civil service.
One of his recommendations when the report was published in 2004 was a reduction of more than 70,000 civil service positions – as well as a massive redeployment from the backroom to frontline roles.
When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition arrived in 2010, pledging to repair the damage done to public finances by the global financial crisis (or by Gordon Brown), civil service job cuts were a central part of its austerity. strategy. Francis Maude was brought in to recommend the reforms.
The size of the civil service declined sharply during the coalition’s period in office, from a peak of about 490,000 in 2009, to less than 390,000 before the EU referendum in 2016.
As the cuts intensified, tensions were rising in some departments – as well as stories of experienced experts being recruited back into departments as consultants at high costs.
Alex Thomas, of the Institute for Government, points to the Department of Health and Defra as departments where significant expertise was lost in repeated efficiency campaigns and needed later.
About Defra, he says: “It was a department that had to undergo a lot of rebuilding since 2016, and few people who really knew the ins and outs of EU regulations in the environment and agriculture would were no more.”
After Brexit, the number of civil servants nearly returned to 2009 levels, as the government worked out the tools to negotiate an exit with Britain’s full-blown Brexit department – since it was dismantled – and those Took tasks that were long sub-contracted for the EU, such as trade negotiations.
Still, Johnson’s target of cutting 91,000 jobs remains ambitious. The latest official figures show there were 475,020 full-time equivalent employees in the civil service in December – so success would mean 19% of them are leaving the payroll.
The policy serves more than one purpose: it aims to save money, at a time when Rishi Sunak is reluctant to open the purse strings; And Johnson fits in with the government’s ideological skepticism that the public sphere is littered with pettyfogging relics.
Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings was waging his own personal war against the Whitehall “blob” before being fired in November 2020, but senior ministers have continued to publicly attack civil servants.
Johnson recently complained of a “post-Covid work-from-home culture”, while the Tory chair, Oliver Dowden, urged civil servants to “get back to their peloton and their desks”.
Recently, the Minister for Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has angered Whitehall employees by spot-checking departments and leaving passive-aggressive notes on the desks of employees who work from home.
Thomas, himself a former civil servant, says that if part of the government’s motivation is to go to war with Whitehall, it will not make this latest efficiency campaign any easier. “If the minister is serious about reforming the civil service and reducing the civil service numbers, it is already difficult enough without trying to pit the civil service against you.”
And when it comes to savings, the government claims will be more than £3bn, it is not always as great as expected, says Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
“It depends what you spend on redundancy payments, which is not a trivial element, and it depends on whether you hire people back in a few years,” he said, adding an arbitrary Picking a number and pursuing it one-mindedly has its risks. “They don’t know whether 90,000 is the right number or not. You need to keep a very careful eye on it.”
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