Arthur Reynolds is a journalist, a former civil servant and government speechwriter.
When all eyes were trained on Labour’s Liverpool spendathon, a recent FT interview with Reform’s Head of Preparing for Government, Danny Kruger, received little attention.
For watchers of Whitehall, however, it made fascinating reading.
Kruger had previously struck a moderate tone when discussing Civil Service reform. In a December speech, he promised to cut around 70,000 jobs – the lion’s share in management – while protecting operational staff such as benefits assessors, immigration caseworkers and tax investigators. This 13 per cent reduction in the full-time workforce, he argued, would save taxpayers £4bn a year.
Writing on his Substack in May, Kruger summed up his thesis for Whitehall reform: “more important than overall numbers is the skills and type of worker in the Civil Service”. He admitted Reform’s policy programme could require hiring additional Border Force and prison officers and lined up bloated communications, policy and HR teams for the axe. All reasonably sensible stuff.
But as I wrote in these pages around that time, Kemi Badenoch’s proposal to remove 132,000 civil servants – around one in four – was measurably bolder. And in my eyes, close to the number of redundancies that could be made without paralysing government in the process.
Mr Kruger now believes that number is markedly higher. He told the FT the civil service would be cut almost in half if Reform wins the next election, with “significant redundancies” frontloaded in the early years of the administration and the potential for cuts to “go a lot further”.
The reasons for this remarkable volte-face are clear – Reform’s top brass remain desperate for headlines in the wake of their donations scandal and to that end, are attempting both to outflank a resurgent Conservative party and compete with an increasingly extreme Restore Britain.
It’s worth examining what implementing Kruger’s proposal would look like. Halving the size of the Civil Service would require as many as 250,000 redundancies – around 1 per cent of full-time UK jobs – and cuts of this scale would likely trigger some kind of economic downturn. Our private sector is not exactly booming and even if that changes, employers will not be queuing up to hire ex-civil servants.
Many of Kruger’s casualties would end up on benefits.
Nor is the move particularly politically shrewd, for the public tends to blame politicians, rather than civil servants for the country’s ills. Each one of the 250,000 people Reform plan to make redundant would have family, friends and neighbours – many would be Reform voters. That’s because, despite the party’s talk of “cutting Whitehall”, four in five civil servants work outside London. Cuts would be felt across Reform’s heartlands in the Midlands and the North; an atmosphere of hostility towards the government could quickly escalate and disruptive trade union protests would be inevitable.
Opposition parties would also make hay by questioning the cost of such a programme and could very easily get the public on their side. Even if only half the cuts required paid exits, taxpayers would still face a £7bn bill at the average cost of current civil service voluntary exit schemes.
Yes, there would be savings on pensions and wages, but as every good campaigner knows, one big number, a £350 million a week, trumps a complicated equation of costs and benefits every time.
Practically, too, the scheme would be almost impossible to deliver in Kruger’s proposed timeframe. An almighty re-organisation would be necessary – never mind comms teams, entire departments would need to be abolished. Regardless of whether Reform, or even the Civil Service, prepared for this scenario, vast amounts of ministerial and official time would be eaten up by the wrangling over which departments and jobs survived.
Here, the merger of NHS England and the Health Department offers an instructive precedent. Eighteen months after Keir Starmer made the announcement, staff morale has plummeted, no money has been saved and the Health Department has been brought to a near standstill – all to cut around 8,000 jobs. Reform, remember, want to cut 30 times that number.
If they’re serious about that, Kruger’s promise of protecting frontline staff would have to be broken. According to official statistics, 300,000 civil servants work in operational delivery, roughly the size Reform wants the entire civil service to be. They cannot credibly claim to need no staff working on policy, security, digital and data, finance, legal, tax or counter-fraud. Actually, on second thoughts, scratch that last one.
I am not, for a second, arguing that the Civil Service does not need drastic reform or large-scale redundancies. I would, however, suggest that a Reform government – or for that matter, a hard-line Conservative administration – could gradually reduce the size of the Civil Service through attrition.
Officials are much happier working under left-wing administrations. It’s a cliche, but a cliche I’ve witnessed with my own eyes.
If unpopular policies around migration – for example a Rwanda-style scheme – were immediately introduced, many liberal civil servants would seek alternative employment at a local authority or charity. Better still, it should be easier to dismiss poor performers. Right now it’s almost impossible to do so, but a right-wing administration ought to be able to move on officials who attempt to wait out their term.
Recruitment freezes, too, can be surprisingly effective. In just nine months Steve Barclay cut the Health Department’s headcount by a sixth largely using this method. Dramatically cutting headcount using a combination of these approaches would take patience, perhaps most of a five-year-term, but it would spare taxpayers a vast redundancy bill and leave ministers with time to govern.
No matter how much Kruger and I wish it were not so, this fact remains: voters will never reward politicians for delivering Civil Service reform at the expense of other policies. The muted reaction to his FT interview ought to tell him as much.