To wonder why civil service haters don't understand that cutting 10,000 jobs is going to hurt everyone

Pretty sure a lot of the jobs will be lower paid admin roles that they can replace with AI.

Yes, I'm aware that international tax planning is international. At the same time it's true that HMRC doesn't offer a competitive rate to attract talent, and there are other ways of taxing these firms than corporation tax itself. Nothing is impossible, there's always a way.

And there are other ways (short of invasion) to bring the Cayman Islands etc. into line.

@BobbyBiscuits

Its very unlikely that there will be 10000 actual redundancies.
Depts will have recruitment freezes, there will be people at retirement who won't be replaced, people who were moving on naturally who won't be replaced.
I took redundancy last year. I'm now a full time foster carer. My best friend who went at the same time now works part time in M&S. Both of us are mortgage free, children grown up. We have taken pensions early. We still need to work but don't need the salaries we did. Some just retired or went free lance.
People will get all sorts of different jobs.
If I remember rightly about 2500 of us went at the same time across 5 or 6 city sites, including London. Not a lot to be absorbed into local employment markets.
Part of the reason I took VR was I was fed up of the constant villification of the CS. Most civil servants are decent hardworking people delivering essential public services. But there is always room for improvement

It is the same old, same old. Cut swathes of civil service jobs. Pay out millions in redundancy. 18 months later start recruiting again. Staff recruited are much cheaper of course, but skills and knowledge have been lost.

Seen it all before. Shame on Labour for not having more imagination.

Sadly I think that you have very little understanding of how corporation tax and global businesses actually work, your’e spouting utter rubbish. When I think of ‘greed and selfishness’ I think of all of those people who could work but opt out and settle for a life on benefits. There is too much government support, it makes it too easy, benefits should be reserved for the people who really, really need them and not the feckless wasters.

Lol it's hilarious that you think they'll get rid of the useless middle managers and idiot seat fillers.

They will get rid of the lower paid staff that really do the actual work. Every service will get even shitter

I think you underestimate the power of the vastly overpaid at the top to justify their own existence at the expense of those who work below them.

Agree. They should have a target for amount of savings, not number of staff- that'd create a focus on the vastly overpaid.

Wrong. I got a £50k increase by moving to a US company!

And for that reason, they should remain in post?

Now that’s what I call fuzzy logic….

I don't know where these people who he's going sack off are going to work? There are transferrable skills from public sector to private but they will have to compete with those with experience in profit making businesses.
He's out to get a his 'own' staff and trying to tell disabled people they're a bunch of lying workshy scum who don't deserve any money anymore.
But equally this government seems to hate businesses, so who does he actually want to help?!

The number of people employed in the UK in the last quarter of 2024 was 33.86 million! 10,000 jobs is a lot but less than 0.03% of that total. I have family who are affected but even they can see there are areas where cuts should be made.

I suppose it depends on how you view it. The idea on here when Labour were getting elected was that they should tax the rich (ie anyone but me).

It was quite rightly pointed out this is unlikely to be successful, and it will be the middle class and small that will end up paying the burden.

Should everyone pay the right amount of tax ? Of course. But inspections can be quite stressful and expensive for business owners, even if all their affairs are 100% in order. It can take significant amounts of time and effort to reply to enquiries and put together the necessary information. Of course you can get insurance to cover some of these costs. But small business owners are still going to have to devote significant amounts of time to it.

What frustrates me is while small business owners will get hit as easy targets, money launderers will simply shut down and disappear, probably to pop up somewhere else in the future. Big business will continue to pay armies of accountants to avoid.

It will be people at the bottom of the commerical enviroment that will end up paying the most as the cost of covering inspections is large in comparison to their revenue. In that respect its pretty similar to benefit snatching, go after the people least able to defend themselves and fight back.

Same. Been a Civil Servant for 12 years and it is shockingly overstaffed and inefficient.

I think this is long overdue. I have worked for NHSE and the civil service. It's bloated, overpaid and inefficient. It's separate to front line NHS workers and often acts as advisory or supervisory roles, ensuring contracts and policy are written and met. They spend years pontificating minor points drafting a policy whilst missing the bigger picture. Invariably they know less than the people that deliver the service they oversee and have to ask them for their help to understand how the service works. Just as they get to the point of either about to publish a policy or know more about their subject area there is a reorganisation which occupies everyone for months on end and no actual work gets done. If frontline performed as well as NHSE do we'd be seeing countless deaths but they'd have lots of meetings and forms to discuss the deaths...

I’m a left of centre civil servant and you’re absolutely wrong.

The bloating of the civil service combined with real terms pay cuts have been awful for the service. You had tens of thousands coming in to do ill defined roles that results in lack of clarity and action dying a death of a thousand clearances, while pay cuts meant many people being promoted before they are ready because it was the only way to get a pay rise.

The drive to make better use of technology, be less cautious and more fit for purpose is absolutely the right one. And those of us who have been frustrated that bloated structures have stopped us from delivering what we need to will welcome it.

As for the wider economic argument - you’re right that the public should support the private. But that has to happen on a macro scale. Employment for employments sake isn’t good economic policy because the costs will almost always outweigh the benefits. So investing in housing, infrastructure and competitiveness means economic benefits beyond just the employment of builders and engineers. That employment is an added bonus, certainly. But economies thrive by producing and selling more - so investing in the capacity of the economy to be more productive makes sense. Spending money just to keep people employed is not good economic policy by itself.

Might make the tiniest dent in the enormous public sector pension bill the rest of us will be paying until we're dead.

No... this is pretty ignorant on your part... not sure you realise how investment banks work but this wont cause them to fail, especially considering the buffers that are required following previous crashes, they'll be fine.

Like it or not the CS is not efficient and performance has not been managed effectively on the whole. I know several people who work for the CS and all of them have repeated frustration over people jumping between jobs for pay rises or being moved rather than managed when underperforming it needs to be held accountable. There are thousands of competent workers in the CS and they deserve to work in effective teams.

Well international companies pay the tax they are legally obliged to pay in the UK according to international tax law. Take google. US company, EU presence in Dublin as Ireland is a tax haven. So all of its services are run out of Dublin. Google UK will be charged a fee roughly the size of its UK revenue by Google in Dublin for these services. Profit in UK minimal. Profit in Dublin big. It’s legal as there are services being provided, and Dublin are charging for the use of the google brand.

The UK can do nothing on their own to address this. They have to work with other countries to solve this. So when people say ‘just tax google etc properly’ they are providing a solution that doesn’t work rather than considering a solution that does work, like increasing the basic rate of income tax, which brings in massive amounts. The usually think like this as they want better public services without having to pay for them themselves.

The jobs market is not on the floor. We are at 4.4% unemployment which is considered full employment economically, there are over 800,000 jobs available in the U.K.

Losing 10k staff also doesn’t mean 10k are out of a job. These will be a mix of people who want to take voluntary redundancy, and were thinking of leaving anyway, or not filling roles when people retire or move on, and compulsory redundancies.

My only question is where are the jobs going. If it’s the DVLA or DWP then it’s a bad call. But if there are areas which have too many people then that’s a good thing.

Don't worry OP, you Tories have been complaining for eons that benefits are generous. They'll still have LOADS to spend

You don't even need brilliant accountants to tackle it. Even "bog standard" ones know what works, what doesn't, how people are getting away with things, how the black economy is growing, etc. Many "normal" bog standard accountants working out in small practices in the regions will already be on salaries comparable or less than tax inspectors. Funnily enough, loads of local tax inspectors took their redundancy payments when local tax offices were closed and went to work in local accounting practices doing peoples' tax returns for pretty similar pay levels. There are whole swathes of "average" accountants who'd jump at the chance to work for HMRC and get the benefits of the public sector but only if there were local tax offices as they don't want to relocate to one of the few huge centralised tax centres.

I work for an ALB and I agree it’s bloated. Whenever a new activity is launched, the immediate thing is to recruit a load of new people instead of reprioritising exiting resource. Lots of time and money wasted on ‘change’ and ‘transformation’ to reduce bureaucracy and inefficiency that quite obviously just increases both. There is also a big issue with people being on long term sick and it’s practically impossible to get rid of low performers - they just get shifted about.

The issue I have is where the cuts are made. We’ve been through headcount reductions through voluntary exit before and invariably the useful people go get other jobs and the ‘bloat’ sticks around. Also there’s a big difference in cutting high salaried desk jobs compared to frontline staff like prison officers. Not sure I trust that the balance will be right.

My partner is working for a housing association and they are trying to frustrate people out of there.

Ideally they will cut the poor performers first. In my department you could cut a quarter with no impact on services - poor performers are just shuffled around teams. But I won't be surprised if the process is executed poorly and the opportunity is wasted.