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The Cabinet Office will lose almost a third of its staff as part of Sir Keir Starmer’s cost-cutting drive across Whitehall, prompting union warnings that the move would undermine government plans for reform.
About 2,100 out of 6,500 jobs will be axed over the next two years in the department that runs the machinery of government, the Cabinet Office said on Thursday.
The department aims to achieve the cost reductions by not replacing personnel who leave via a voluntary exit scheme and by relocating about 900 people to different departments.
In a call with staff, Cabinet Office permanent secretary Cat Little announced plans to restructure the department to make it more specialist and smaller, as part of a wider drive to save £110mn in costs by 2028.
But Lucille Thirlby, assistant general secretary of the FDA union representing public service manager and professionals, said there was a “difference between reforming and cutting”. She added that “the success of any reforms will depend on whether the scale of cuts undermine the reform”.
“Cutting a third of the core department will impact the delivery of the government’s own agenda, including their ‘Plan for Change’,” she said, referring to the prime minister’s six milestones for reform.
“Ministers will now need to be honest about what the government will stop doing as a result of these cuts,” she added.
The Cabinet Office is responsible for assisting the prime minister and his cabinet members in their roles, as well as supporting cohesion and delivery across Whitehall.
Allies of Little say she has been concerned the department had lost its strategic focus in recent years, and has increasingly been lumped with a rag-tag assortment of policy problems deemed “too difficult” for other departments to handle.
Little wanted to restore the department to a nimbler and more strategic delivery-focused ministry, they said.
“Leading by example, we are creating a leaner and more focused Cabinet Office that will drive work to reshape the state and deliver our Plan for Change,” the Cabinet Office said.
“This government will target resources at frontline services — with more teachers in classrooms, extra hospital appointments and police back on the beat.”
The move forms part of Starmer’s wider plan to cut about 10,000 jobs across Whitehall as he seeks to find savings worth 5 per cent of departments’ budgets.
Headcount in the civil service topped 513,000 last year, a 34 per cent increase on 2016 levels, and the eighth year in a row that the total has risen.
Last month, health secretary Wes Streeting announced that NHS England would be abolished, with many of its functions rolled into the department of health. The move is expected to result in the loss of 9,000 jobs.
