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More than 10,000 civil service jobs are set to be cut under ministers’ plans to find savings of 5 per cent to their departments in the spending review, according to government figures.
Ministers are looking at rolling out voluntary redundancy programmes across a range of departments to achieve the savings that chancellor Rachel Reeves has demanded as part of her comprehensive review of expenditure.
Headcount in the civil service topped 513,000 this year, a 34 per cent increase on 2016 levels and the eighth year in a row that the total has risen.
Plans to reduce the overall tally of civil servants nonetheless risk further denting morale among officials after Sir Keir Starmer last week declared that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
The prime minister appeared to row back on that sentiment on Tuesday with a letter to all officials praising their “dedication and professionalism”, while blaming “bureaucratic impediments, silos, processes about processes” for any poor performance.
Some departments have already indicated the expected size of their cuts. The Ministry of Defence is examining 10 per cent reductions to its 56,800-strong civil service workforce over the course of this parliament, its permanent secretary David Williams told MPs at the defence select committee last month.
Echoing Defence Secretary John Healey’s remarks that the ministry must become “leaner”, Williams said productivity gains would smooth some of the anticipated civilian personnel cuts. He also stressed that some areas, such as digital defence, would need to see a higher level of staff.
In a speech on public sector reform on Monday, Pat McFadden, the minister in charge of the Cabinet Office, said that “technology should help us become more productive and fruitful” in the civil service.
Greater use of AI in tasks such as drafting correspondence and taking minutes of meetings would reduce the need for some administrative staff, Whitehall figures said.
However, McFadden — who would not be publicly drawn on questions about the ballooning civil service headcount this week — is not planning to impose top-down cuts or recruitment freezes on other departments, like the last Conservative administration.
One government official said: “We’re not going to pluck an arbitrary number and set a cap, because we know what happened when that was tried before: the government ended up spending a lot on consultants.”
Labour has vowed to halve state spending on external consultants.
“There’s a general feeling that we can’t keep growing,” the person added. “The number of civil servants in the last few years has gone up and up . . . The reality is that departments are going to have to find a way of dealing with spending cuts.”
Reeves set the envelope for expenditure in 2026-29 in the Budget in October. The spending review, which launched on Tuesday and is set to conclude next June, will see ministers haggle over every line of their departmental budgets.
Whitehall figures say there is no talk of compulsory redundancies at present.
Additionally, small but strategic changes in the machinery of government are also expected in coming months. The Cabinet Office has already transferred the government digital service and other data units to the Department of Science and Technology.
Last week Cat Little, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, set out her intention to “get back to what the core parts” of her department should be.
She told MPs on the public administration committee: “We have ended up being the place where, if no one else puts their hand up and you want something done in the centre, it comes to us.”
