Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has announced a cap on Public Service numbers. Photo: Supplied.
The United Kingdom Government will cap the Public Service at its current headcount of 488,000 and aim to get it down to pre-pandemic numbers, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has announced.
The Treasury labelled the policy the ‘Civil Service Numbers Cap’ in a press release, saying it would come into effect immediately and would remain in place for the duration of the current Spending Review period, which lasts until 2025.
Government Departments would be asked to produce plans “on driving down headcount over the long-term to pre-pandemic levels” as part of the Public Sector Productivity Review being carried out by Chief Secretary to the Treasury John Glen.
Mr Glen’s review is due to be published before the end of the year.
Mr Hunt said the freeze on Public Service expansion would save £1 billion ($A1.9 billion) next year.
“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,” the Chancellor said.
He said he would not lift the freeze until the government had a proper plan, not just for the Public Service, but for all public sector productivity improvements.
Unions have slammed the plans, with General Secretary of the FDA, which covers senior bureaucrats, Dave Penman describing Mr Hunt’s announcement as “straight out of the Jacob Rees-Mogg playbook”.
In February 2022, Mr Rees-Mogg announced plans to cut 65,000 jobs to get the Public Service headcount “under control”.
Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced three months later, in May 2022, that this would be increased to 91,000 cuts, a plan which current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak subsequently scrapped in November 2022.
Mr Penman said Mr Hunt had, just like Mr Rees-Mogg, picked a point in time in the past and decided “that is the right number of staff to deal with the Public Service challenges of the future – an approach that is intellectually bereft”.
“It is so glaringly arbitrary that all it does is demonstrate this is not a serious government,” Mr Penman said.
– London, 7 October 2023
