Former Treasury minister Lord Agnew has suggested that the UK could save £35 billion per year by making cutbacks within the Civil Service to render it more efficient.
He said that around 60,000 people within the Civil Service were in needless roles, including 5,000 Department of Health & Social Care personnel who just “talk to each other”.
The civil servants’ union, the FDA, said that the Civil Service had been forced to take on more staff to help handle Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the UK response to the conflict in Ukraine.
The government voiced back in May that it planned to cut up to 91,000 civil service roles in a bid to return to 2016 staffing levels within three years.
Dave Penman, the FDA secretary-general, said that any Civil Service cuts would ultimately affect frontline public services and any claim to the contrary was dishonesty on the part of politicians.
However, Lord Agnew believes that the cuts would not damage public services.
Speaking at a Conservative Party Conference event addressing the state of the Civil Service, Lord Agnew said: “To balance the books over the next couple of years, the free hit is from the inefficiencies in government - a very simple number - probably about £35 billion a year without taking anything away from the frontline.
“The problem with it is, it takes agonising attention to detail and staying power and that is the thing - with the greatest respect to a lot of politicians - they are not terribly good at.”
Ex-Cabinet Office minister, Lord Maude, echoed Lord Agnew’s concerns around the size of the Civil Service at the same event and suggested that offloading some roles could enable those remaining to receive better salaries.
Lord Maude said that there were some “fantastic civil servants” working for government but the system they were operating in was “fundamentally broken” and needed overhauling.
He suggested that new ministers needed better training in how to manage civil servants working under them and were ill prepared for their tasks in government, having been "randomly plucked from the backbenches" and then tasked with picking up a key role.
This approach, Lord Maude said, was "not a way to run a successful government".
Photo by UK Government on Wikimedia Commons
