Conservative efficiency plans will not lead to compulsory redundancies in the civil service, George Osborne has said.
Interviewed in the latest edition of Whitehall and Westminster World, the shadow chief secretary insisted that Whitehall’s civil servants need not fear the impact of the James review.
"We’ve set aside a very considerable amount of assets," Osborne said.
"James identified, for example, the non-canal properties of the British Waterways Board. So we will use the sale of these assets - £5.9 billion in total - to pay for voluntary redundancies.
"We’ve worked out that this provides for an average redundancy package of £68,000 and that will mean that of the 235,000 total civil service posts we will remove, 90,000 are being outsourced, 40,000 are positions we will never hire because we will impose a recruitment freeze from the first day in office, and the remainder will be people who are offered this voluntary redundancy."
Osborne also drew on his experience of working with civil servants in both 10 Downing Street and other government departments.
"We know what a first class machine the British civil service is, but just because the people involved are of a very high quality - and in no way do we want to impugn their qualities - it doesn’t mean that we need quite as many as we have," he said.
"After all, we all pay for civil service posts through our taxes and there is a feeling that the size of the service has grown considerably.
"The government no longer publishes the figures on administrative costs in Whitehall but, for example, there have been some estimates of the number of back-office posts have increased by about 300,000 under this government."
London plans
Osborne added that officials in the Government Office for London, which the Tories would abolish, should actually see the plans as an opportunity and not a threat.
"I think civil servants would be as frustrated as anyone if they are being asked to do non-existent functions, or merely engaged in empire building," he said.
"They want to be turning policy into action and indeed helping to devise policy.
"A huge number of the Government Office for London’s responsibilities are duplicated by the GLA and mayoralty.
"I would wonder whether civil servants in that particular department are getting total job satisfaction."
Civil service unions have little time for the Conservative plans, however.
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: "Rather than truly looking at how things can be done more efficiently, we have the Tories jumping on the cuts bandwagon in order to out bid the government."
