Manifestos are predominantly gift lists, and the most important present the Labour Party manifesto promises the civil service is breathing space. Spending cuts, though less severe than those promised by the Tories, are inescapable. However, the party’s promise of a penny rise in employer national insurance contributions would delay the pain until the second year of any new Labour administration.

The manifesto and Budget both promise extensive ‘efficiency savings’, and it is clear that the civil service would face a major resource crunch under Labour, with money pinched from a dazzling array of sources. Labour’s manifesto of 2005 promised similar savings, identified by the Gershon Review; the success of those measures is disputed. This unfinished business does suggest that there are opportunities for further savings, but it also raises questions over Labour’s ability to push the civil service into making them.

Despite the detailed savings plans, neither the 2010 manifesto nor the Budget contains any reference to a single civil servant losing their job: the furthest the party has gone is to promise caps on pay rises and pension levels. Last year’s government efficiency blueprint, Smarter Government, even said that a greater shift to online transactions would ‘free-up staff to provide personal support and advice’, rather than suggesting that jobs could be cut. Avoiding talk of redundancies, Labour hopes to convince the public – and public servants – that things would be worse under the Tories.

Given the strong support Labour has traditionally received from many public sector workers, there are strong strategic electoral reasons for the lack of reference to redundancies or recruitment freezes. Although the subtext of the efficiency strategy is fairly clear – and the government has already reduced the civil service redundancy scheme, making any future compulsory job losses much less costly – the Labour Party cannot provoke its traditional base by committing to paper any plans to shed government posts.

Labour’s emphasis on public sector efficiency over job cuts also reflects Gordon Brown’s ideological commitment to the importance of the state in encouraging economic growth. The manifesto contains a strong passage on interventionism, claiming that ‘the role of government is not to stand aside, but to nurture private-sector dynamism, properly supporting infrastructure and the sectors of the future’. Significantly, last year’s Treasury efficiency document called for ‘smarter, not smaller government’.

However, any senior civil servant not already preparing for a vigorous pruning of manpower under Labour would be burying their head deep in the sand. When Alistair Darling’s March Budget pledged that frontline services in health, education and international development would be sheltered from cuts, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that this would require other departments to slash their budgets by a quarter; last week, the IFS expressed its frustration with all the main parties’ reluctance to grasp this nettle before polling day. Audit Commission chief Steve Bundred, among others, has voiced strong doubts that the proposed savings can be achieved without staff reductions.

Indeed, when challenged directly by TV interviewers, reluctant admissions from ministers have given brief glimpses of the real picture. Treasury minister Stephen Timms admitted to the BBC in April that there “will be some job losses, without a doubt”. Home secretary Alan Johnson has similarly refused to commit to maintaining current police staffing levels after the election. Details, however, remain elusive; Timms would only say that no decision would be made until the next spending review, which he said would take place later this year.

Labour maintains that there is a compelling economic argument to maintain government intervention in the economy during the coming financial year, with Brown arguing that immediate cuts in spending would increase the danger of a ‘double-dip’ recession. Clearly, the party is more committed to the role of ‘big government’ than its rivals. But the size of the hole in the UK’s public finances – unequalled since the war’s end in 1945 – means that the best the party can offer to the cogs in its trusty state machinery is a little time to prepare for the oncoming tempest.

Last updated 751 days ago by Civil Service Live