Chancellor Rachel Reeves is seeking to trim £2 billion from the government’s £13 billion administration budget, with up to 50,000 jobs being cut in her Spring Statement. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government was ‘looking across the board’ for savings. But do Reeves and Starmer really have the courage, and the political capital, to carry out such a purge?
On paper, Labour’s task looks straightforward enough. Civil service numbers over the past 15 years have performed a bungee jump. Between 2010 and 2016, the coalition, followed by David Cameron’s majority Conservative government, succeeded in trimming civil service numbers from 492,000 to 384,000. Then they began to climb again, firstly in response to the Brexit negotiations and then thanks to Covid. Numbers then continued to climb, hitting 515,000 by last autumn.
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