Brown axes 104,000 public sector jobs

July 12 2004 - In today's annual spending review speech, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced plans to cut 84,150 civil service jobs in England and a further 20,000 in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 20,000 other jobs will be transferred from London and the South-East to cheaper locations such as South Wales and Yorkshire.

The plans were met with some scepticism. Will Hutton, Chief Executive, The Work Foundation, said:

"Our research into privatised companies clearly proves that efficiencies are possible of the order the Chancellor wants across the public sector, but the jury is very definitely still out on these proposals at the moment. Straight substitution of resources from the centre to the frontline is a hollow promise. Creating a more efficient environment and delivering organisational change is impossible unless there is a plan to invest in the skills and systems that underpin them. Until more detail is made available, there is a very real prospect that while costs will be cut, quality of service delivery will suffer."

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "We welcome the sustained and unprecedented investment in health, education, childcare and other vital spending programmes. Unions will welcome continuing support for services to manufacturing, the boost to science, and the increase in overseas aid.

"We are however very concerned at the sudden escalation and arbitrary manner of the civil service job cuts. These cuts cannot be made without hitting the quality of public services. They will deal civil service morale a bitter blow just as staff support is needed for change."

Commenting ahead of publication of the review, John Philpott, Chief Economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, warned that the time for simply talking a good game on modernising the public services is over:

"Ministers are absolutely right when they say they want to champion the users of public services over public service producer interests, promote user choice and empower local communities - in the process adopting a mission rather than rules driven approach to service delivery and devolving decision making to front-line staff. Yet look at what is happening on the ground and there is a serious question mark over whether the government is pursuing a genuinely modernising agenda.

"And despite some welcome moves toward so-called 'constrained discretion', managers and workers at local level complain of too little discretion and too much constraint when it comes to how they go about meeting delivery targets set in Whitehall. This is to some degree understandable given the need to ensure that public sector organisations are accountable to the taxpayer.

But the resulting red tape undermines the autonomy and trust needed for high performance. And it also de-motivates staff, to the detriment of service improvements."

According to CIPD research, poor people management is a major cause of stress in the public sector. Central Government officials are especially likely to complain about this aspect of their work.

Philpott continued, "It seems to be no accident that central government has one the highest rates of absenteeism across the range of public, voluntary and private sector organisations, nor that many public bodies face serious staff recruitment and retention difficulties despite the relatively strong growth in public sector pay rates in recent years.

"Without an immediate change of tack such problems look set to get worse rather than better as the private sector recovers and competes more actively for labour. In addition, poor people management is hardly likely to be conducive to a smooth process of downsizing in Whitehall departments as the government tries to realise potential savings highlighted by the Gershon review."

The CIPD believes that the Government should change its approach and:

* Further, and significantly, reduces the number of centralised targets

* Greatly increases consultation on targets that are set

* Allow managers much more discretion at local level over pay-setting

* Put people management at the heart of the reform process by shifting from a command and control style of management to a high performance model based on autonomy and trust.