Annabel Denham

It’s time to take a chainsaw to the British civil service

Javier Milei has reduced the number of government departments from 18 to nine and fired 30,000 public sector workers in Argentina (Getty)

Slashing Whitehall waste is a pledge that brings to mind Augustine’s prayer for the Lord to make him virtuous – but not yet. It is something repeatedly promised by governments, but rarely delivered. Here we are again, days out from the final Budget before voters go to the polls in a general election, and Jeremy Hunt is announcing a crackdown on bureaucracy in the public sector. He intends to reduce the civil service headcount by 66,000, returning it to pre-pandemic levels.

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Voters are likely to feel cynical. Britain’s public sector is riddled with entitlement and waste at levels described by the Chancellor as ‘immoral’. In January the chief of the National Audit Office warned the government is squandering £10 billion every year. Nearly six million people are now employed in the public sector. The total public sector pay bill was around £233 billion in the 2021/22 financial year, accounting for roughly a fifth of all government spending.

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