The Cabinet Office has budgeted for a cost of £27m to pay for its current wave of more than 500 voluntary exits and is keen to avoid redundancies for the further 600-700 jobs it wants to cut over the coming years, MPs have been told.
The department's permanent secretary Cat Little and chief operating officer Sarah Harrison appeared before parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee yesterday. They were asked about the Cabinet Office's plans to reduce headcount by 1,200 over the course of the 2025 Spending Review period, alongside the transfer of 900 jobs to other parts of government.
Little told MPs that plans to streamline the department had evolved since December last year, when a voluntary exit scheme targeting 400 departures was launched. The revised proposals set out earlier this month saw a threefold increase in the number of expected departures.
She said the original plan had been “constrained” by what the department could afford, but that £150m in match-funding for exit schemes included as part of the £3.25bn “Transformation Fund” announced last month had opened up wider possibilities.
Little said that up to 540 officials would leave the Cabinet Office through the voluntary exit scheme, with restructuring over the course of the Spending Review period set to reduce headcount by a further 600-700.
COO Harrison gave MPs the Cabinet Office’s £27m expectation for the first wave of voluntary exits, but said the cost of the 600-700 future departures had yet to be ascertained. Pointedly, she suggested that the potential for redundancies could not be ruled out.
“We would want to seek to redeploy those staff as much as possible to opportunities that may exist across other government departments,” she said. “Some of those will leave as a matter of natural turnover, and some of them will secure some of those voluntary exit routes that we’ve described.”
Earlier in the session, Little set out the four main routes for non-resignation departures from the civil service: voluntary exit; voluntary redundancy; compulsory redundancy; and mutually-agreed exit.
Harrison added: “We want to avoid, if we can, redundancy. But we’ve also been clear that may not be the case across the board.
“The calculation of the cost associated with that balance of 600-700 is something that we’ll have to establish as we go through the next business-planning round.”
Staff will be ‘more capable, more focused’
PACAC chair Simon Hoare asked Little whether the Cabinet Office’s proposals to streamline its operations – shedding around one-third of its staff in the coming years – could make the department less effective.
Little acknowledged there is “always a risk that delivery is hampered whenever an organisation goes through significant change”. But she said she expected the Cabinet Office’s planned restructure to result in a more agile organisation.
“I’m very confident that by having less people who are more capable, more focused more strategic, have greater accountability, that it will be easier to co-ordinate under pressure," she said.
Little said the Cabinet Office had taken on more and more responsibilities in recent years, leaving it “very thinly spread”.
“While it’s a large department, it is touching the surface of lots of difficult issues," she said. “And what we’re trying to aim to do here is to focus on a smaller number of bigger issues and have real depth and real leadership capability – and more seniority so that we can coordinate more easily.
“The bigger the department has got, the harder it has been to ensure collective movement, collective join-up.”
Little said it was the Cabinet Office’s job to look at the health of the overall system, and that included empowering other departments.
“Quite often people think that being closer to the prime minister or closer to the centre of government means you’ve got more levers to get things done,” she said. “Our job is to make sure that all departments have the levers and the accountability and the empowerment to deliver.”
Little said the Cabinet Office’s role had to be about setting up the system to succeed, not just taking on roles from other departments.
“That cannot be the answer when you’re trying to deliver so many big, difficult things,” she said.