A bonfire of civil servants – not

Editorial: Rachel Reeves deserves credit for wanting to make cuts to a bloated civil service but she needs a bolder approach than the light trim she intends to give it

The chancellor’s confirmation, during her round of the Sunday talk shows, that the civil service will be included in the spending cuts to be announced in her spring statement marked a welcome recognition that responsible stewardship begins at home. With employers, pensioners, sickness benefit claimants and recipients of foreign aid all lined up for spending cuts over the eight months that Labour has been in power, for the government to exempt its own machine would have been politically, as well as economically, unwise.

Nor should it have been a particularly hard decision to take, especially now, with broad swathes of the population feeling the economic pinch. Civil service numbers have grown significantly since the Covid pandemic (when an increase could be justified). Pay has risen, as promotions have been used to offset pay curbs, with civil servants also among the beneficiaries of this government’s early largesse, promised a 5 per cent rise, far above the rate of inflation.

What is more, reducing both the size and the cost of the civil service is something that the public and the prime minister increasingly agree on. Sir Keir Starmer shocked many in its ranks by singling out the civil service for early criticism, describing too many of its members as being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”; in a recent speech he described the working of the state as “overcautious and flabby”.

Sir Keir is by no means the first prime minister to be frustrated by what might be seen as the staid ways of the civil service, but he came to his view rather earlier than some, and had been seen in some quarters as the civil servants’ friend, not least in his appointment of Sue – now Baroness – Gray as his chief of staff to ease Labour’s way into government. As is well known, that did not end well.

As Sir Keir and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, may also find, however, reducing the size of the state, however “flabby” it appears from outside, is more difficult than it might look. So, too, could be judging success or failure, given how opaque the actual scale of any reductions remains.

It is only natural for a government to simplify its plans in pursuit of headlines. But the switching between percentages and raw numbers and categories of spending and jobs leaves much unclear. It will be instructive to see how much is clarified, or not, after Ms Reeves has delivered her spring statement on Wednesday.

It took Sky News’s Sir Trevor Phillips several attempts to elicit from the chancellor a figure of “around 10,000” civil servants who could lose their jobs, which may sound a lot, but is actually less than 2 per cent of the total and intended to take effect over a period of several years. Ms Reeves also plans a 15 per cent cut in spending – but that, she clarified in another interview, is spending on “administrative running costs”, including outside consultants and back-office functions, in other words, not staff jobs. Looking at the figures so far released, her plans look less like cuts than a trim.

This may not, of itself, be a bad thing. The prime minister and chancellor both insist that the prime purpose is less to make savings for their own sake, although cutting waste is an objective, than to refocus staff and resources on frontline functions, and move from a civil service culture of generalists towards employing more technically qualified specialists in needed fields. To which two responses might be in order: first, to hail this as a positive, if belated, change that could indeed help to modernise the machine of state, but second, to warn of the obstacles likely to be strewn in their path, in view of the entrenched self-protection mechanisms of the UK’s Sir Humphreys.

So while it is positive that the chancellor appears to be looking for other solutions before either jeopardising market trust by revising her self-imposed fiscal rules or breaking her promises to leave income tax and some other taxes alone, there would seem to be little good cheer here for the average household.

The reality is that cuts in public spending, and that includes cuts to the civil service unless expertly done, risk coming back to bite the very people who need help from the state the most. If the government is serious about not just trimming but reforming the civil service, it will need a clear sense of purpose and a great deal of tenacity – a good deal more of both, in fact, than it has shown so far.