After a tense phoney war while the government pushed through reforms to redundancy terms, job cuts got into full swing in the springtime. Colin Marrs picks over the latest, dramatic Office for National Statistics figures.

Most torrents begin as a trickle, and the coalition’s programme to cut civil service staff is no exception. Figures released last week by the Office for National Statistics showed the hitherto gentle flow of departing civil servants turning into a veritable waterfall, with record numbers picking up their P45s during the second quarter of the year. No-one can remember a precedent for such a fast reduction in headcount, and there is no guarantee that the worst has been seen yet.

Civil service employment reached a peak of 498,110 ‘full time equivalent’ (FTE) staff in the third quarter of 2009, before falling at an average of less than one per cent each quarter until the first quarter of this year. The ONS figures show that during the second quarter of this year, this drop jumped to 3.9 per cent – a total of 18,270 FTE posts. It equates to a 5.4 per cent fall in the three quarters since November’s comprehensive spending review. Meanwhile, head counts (based on the total number of people employed, rather than the hours worked) are falling fast across the public sector, with the reductions deepest in London and England’s poorer, further-flung regions (see map).

These overall figures mask a disparity between the rate of redundancies in core Whitehall departments and in the rest of the civil service. Think-tank the Institute for Government says that, after taking structural changes into account, the number of civil servants in core Whitehall departments has dropped by 8.7 per cent since the spending review – more than twice the rate in the rest of the civil service. “It is clear that there’s a concerted effort to lead this process from the centre,” says Justine Stephen, an IfG research analyst.

Stephen believes this top-down principle also applies to the process within Whitehall departments. Apart from the Home Office, where a more organic process has taken place, she says departments have chopped from the top. “Up until now, senior civil servants have made up the bulk of the redundancy statistics,” she comments. “Part of the reason we are seeing such a big jump now is that the process is filtering through to the lower grades.”

The figures also reveal marked differences between the rate of loss in different Whitehall departments. Some have raced out of the traps: the communities department (DCLG) has cut its core staff by 19.8 per cent since the spending review, the Home Office by 17.6 per cent and the business department (BIS) by 15.7 per cent. Raj Tulsiani, chief executive of interim management consultant Green Park, says: “Some departments are in a better position because they have senior staff who used to work in the private sector who are used to planning and managing this sort of process.”

A spokesman for BIS explains that it got ahead with the cuts early because 2011-12 is the year when departments need to save the most money. He says: “Our plan to share services and back-office functions across our partner bodies will bring us significant savings in 2012-13 and 2014-15 but not before then, so we need to make sure that we can live within our means for the rest of the spending review period.”

By contrast, some departments have made little progress in reducing headcounts. The ONS statistics show two departments – Culture, Media & Sport, and Energy & Climate Change – actually increasing their staffing levels during the last quarter. DCMS, currently gearing up for the Olympics, is seen as a special case. But a spokesman for DECC says: “We have a very challenging programme ahead of us and are not planning any staff reductions. All of our savings will come from non-pay areas.”

Stephen says that other departments are taking a similar line, making only small reductions in staff and concentrating on cutting spending in other areas. Treasury cost reduction targets of around 33 per cent refer to overall administration budgets, not headcounts, and some departments hope that efficiency savings will keep redundancies well below this proportion.

For a number of departments, the process is already complete. A spokesman for BIS says: “We made our last reductions in July and are expecting the rest of our savings to come from efficiencies.” However, another big cutter, the DCLG, says it will not complete its process until October 2012. A spokeswoman says that it is intending to match its 30 per cent administration budget cuts with an equivalent cut in staff levels.

In general, Stephen says that the departments which have suffered the biggest cuts so far are likely to slow down, while the slower ones are likely to jump further. It is clear that few departments will make 30 per cent reductions in staff. But she has words of warning for those banking on saving jobs through efficiency improvements: “It is quite a big risk. If efficiency savings don’t deliver as many savings as you hope, you will have to make even more savings from staff costs than if you had started earlier.”

Click here to see all news and features from Civil Service World

Written by Colin Marrs, CSW