28 January 2005
Work and Pensions Secretary Alan Johnson this week suspended plans to axe 25% of staff at the troubled Child Support Agency, but in the process reignited the row over government plans to cut 80,000 civil service posts.
Johnson has given the CSA time to improve its performance, but warned he could take the 'nuclear option' and close the agency following a critical report from the Commons' work and pensions select committee. MPs reported on January 26 that the 'woeful' CSA should be closed unless it improves within weeks.
Johnson said: 'I think the select committee would agree… we would only do that when we were absolutely convinced that this system just isn't going to work.'
The CSA, which enforces child maintenance payments, has been dogged by a problematic £465m IT system that has left a backlog of 250,000 unprocessed claims. More than £720m in payments remains uncollected, while £947m was recently written off as 'unrecoverable'.
To improve matters, Johnson has taken the advice of the committee and suspended the Department for Work and Pensions' plan to cut 2,600 staff.
He said: 'While my department will continue to reduce its head count by 30,000 posts, we will protect frontline staff resources by ensuring no major reduction in frontline CSA staff numbers until the new computer system is working effectively.'
Civil service unions seized on this commitment. The CSA cuts form part of efficiency targets identified in Sir Peter Gershon's 2004 report on Whitehall, which identified 84,000 posts to be scrapped by 2008. Departmental ministers originally insisted that the job cuts would focus on 'back-office' staff, and indicated that frontline workers and services would be unaffected.
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services union told Public Finance: 'We support Alan Johnson's decision to suspend the CSA reductions. But this proves the government's lie that its efficiency programme would not affect frontline services.
'To justify the Gershon agenda, the government created a false divide between back-office and frontline staff across departments, but this statement [on the CSA] shows that these jobs are vital parts of chains that process key services.'
A DWP spokeswoman said that the department 'always considered its efficiency commitments to include frontline staff.'
In his 2004 Budget statement, Chancellor Gordon Brown gave a different interpretation. He said the DWP changes would 'unlock savings in back-office administration and at the same time move resources to the front line'.
PFjan2005
