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About 50,000 civil service jobs are facing the axe as ministers enter the final phase of a “brutal” public spending review, as chancellor Rachel Reeves cuts spending across Whitehall.
Officials briefed on the negotiations expect about 10 per cent of Britain’s roughly 500,000 full-time equivalent civil service posts to go. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the number comes down to 450,000 by 2030,” said one person.
The civil service jobs cull is one manifestation of a spending control process that Reeves wants to wrap up by the start of next week. “It’s almost done,” said one minister involved in the talks.
Treasury officials said that more than half of government departments, including big spenders such as the Ministry of Justice, have settled their budgets for the next three years.
However, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner is fighting the Treasury for more money for local council services and housing, while home secretary Yvette Cooper is locked in negotiations to secure more cash, notably for policing. “It has been brutal,” said one official involved in the negotiations.
Sir Mark Rowley, London’s police chief, joined the lobbying effort on Wednesday, in an eleventh-hour plea for more money known inside the Treasury as “shroud waving”. The chancellor will deliver her spending review settlement on June 11.
“There’s been a bit less of that this time than in previous spending reviews,” said one Treasury official. “But now would be a good time for ministers to settle, holding out to the last minute isn’t a good idea.”
Darren Jones, Treasury chief secretary, is overseeing the last-minute talks. Ministers who hold out for more cash until the end find themselves fighting over a diminishing pot, as other departments settle their budgets.
A 10 per cent reduction in the civil service headcount is seen in Whitehall as manageable, given the significant rise in the central bureaucracy in recent years, notably after Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis.
The Cabinet Office declined to comment, but one well-placed official confirmed: “A total of about 450,000 civil servants by the end of the decade is about right.”
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The Institute for Government, a think-tank, found that the number of full time equivalent civil servants fell to below 390,000 in 2016, at the end of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s “austerity” programme and just before the EU referendum.
The extra pressure caused by Brexit saw numbers rise to about 425,000 by the time the first Covid-19 lockdowns took place, before increasing to 515,000 last year.
“This growth occurred despite the former chancellor Jeremy Hunt imposing an ‘immediate’ cap on civil service headcount in October 2023,” the IFG said in its Whitehall Monitor report.
Senior Whitehall officials said a 10 per cent headcount reduction was manageable, and could be achieved without compulsory redundancies, if Britain entered a new period of relative political and economic calm.
Dave Penman, head of the FDA civil service union, said: “Civil servants don’t get to decide on the size of the civil service, ministers do. The political chaos of the last decade was both inefficient and ineffective.
“It meant successive governments may have spent a great deal of energy talking about cuts, yet in reality they piled promises on top of promises. The number of civil servants had to grow to try and match those political commitments,” he added.
Reeves announced in March that Whitehall running costs would be cut by 15 per cent by 2030, a target that includes job cuts, a streamlining of the government estate and moving some posts out of London.
The chancellor said at the time she was “confident that we can reduce civil service numbers by 10,000”, although officials said privately that Reeves expected to achieve much bigger falls in headcount.
Data visualisation by Amy Borrett
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