Rishi Sunak has scrapped a Government target of axing around 91,000 civil servants’ jobs as he criticised the “top-down targets” set under Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister instead said in a message to civil servants on Tuesday that he and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will ask individual departments to “maximise efficiency within budgets”.
The target of reducing the Civil Service by around a fifth was being worked on earlier this year by Jacob Rees-Mogg while he was a Cabinet Office minister under Mr Johnson. Mr Sunak’s reversal of the policy comes as he seeks spending cuts and tax rises while trying to address a black hole of up to £50 billion in the public finances.
Writing to civil servants, he said: “Together, we must make sure every taxpayer pound goes as far as it possibly can. I do not believe that top-down targets for Civil Service headcount reductions are the right way to do that.
