Letwin cynical about civil service cuts
The Shadow Chancellor today accused Gordon Brown of “dodgy arithmetic” in his calculations of planned civil service cuts.
Oliver Letwin invited Ministers to “rebut the allegations”, during a press briefing at which he sought to “explode myths” about the Government’s planned civil service job cuts, outlined by the Chancellor during the Comprehensive Spending Review.
In this month’s Spending Review Gordon Brown announced plans to cull over 104,000 civil service jobs and divert the resources to the front line.
Mr Letwin said: “We have been trying to persuade various people in the media for some time that there is a problem with Mr Brown’s dodgy arithmetic.”
He hoped to “crack through” and find that people were now realising the “scale of the problem”.
The Shadow Chancellor highlighted that since the Spending Review, Mr Brown had not been stressing 20,000 of the 104,000 job cuts he had announced because that 20,000 “was composed of a wing and a prayer”.
In a detailed examination of the plans, Mr Letwin noted that 15,000 of the proposed cuts are in local government and the remainder in the devolved administrations, both of which “the Chancellor doesn’t control staffing numbers of”. Therefore he argued that the number of job cuts had declined from 104,000 to 84,000 “almost unseen by the world”.
Mr Letwin also stressed that 13,000 of the jobs identified in the Gershon Review were actually relocations. Furthermore, he pointed to Mr Brown’s comments in front of the Treasury Select Committee, where he revealed that 10,000 of the cuts would be personal assistants in job centres.
The Shadow Chancellor maintained that this meant that it was 71,000 jobs “which are actually being cut”.
He was prepared to accept that the Chancellor had every intention of cutting 71,000 jobs from the civil service. “However, and it’s a big however”, he said that Mr Brown refused to indicate how many jobs would be added.
He claimed that the current hiring rate is 511 a week, and argued that: “At that rate you would have to cut significantly more than 71,000 jobs by 2008 to have a net reduction at all.” Further, Mr Letwin argued that the evidence so far of fulfilling the claims that staffing numbers really would be reduced was “not as robust as it should be.”
He said that the Government’s own figures indicated that public sector employment grew by 496,000 between 1997 and 2003. The Conservative Party’s calculations show that 221,689 of these were employed in the front-line.
Pointing to the leaked Gershon report, Mr Letwin said that the Government were planning to add 360,000 public sector jobs over the next three years.
Based on past trends, Mr Letwin calculated that the Government’s plans would mean that 200,000 of the 360,000 new posts would not be front-line staff, which would result in “129,000 more jobs than you started with”.
Mr Letwin said it was entirely open for the Government to counter the accusations, but said, “I don’t believe they have an effective rebuttal”.
