By Richard Johnstone | 29 July 2011
Thousands more civil servant posts at the Ministry of Defence are to go, only months after the government announced that 25,000 jobs would be lost by 2015.
Ursula Brennan, permanent secretary at the MoD, has written to staff saying the department needs to ‘bear down further on non-frontline costs’, with 7,000 more jobs now set to go between 2015 and 2020.Last October’s Strategic Defence and Security Review revealed plans to cut the number of civilian employees from 85,000 to 60,000.
These job losses are part of the 8% cuts in defence spending announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review. They will also help close a ten-year, £38bn black hole in the department’s finances identified by Defence Secretary Liam Fox.
However, trade unions said that the extra cuts, so soon after the first round, were ‘shameful’.
The Public and Commercial Services union, which represents the majority
of the MoD’s civilian staff, said it was ‘totally unreasonable’ for the
department to announce another round of job losses when there was supposed to
be joint work underway to avoid the first tranche.
General secretary Mark Serwotka said: ‘Since the defence review announcement in October, PCS has been thwarted at every turn in our attempts to find out where these cuts will be made and what impact it will have on the front line. How can the MoD announce more job cuts when they have no idea how they will run the department just now?’
The Prospect trade union, which represents more than 6,000 civilian
defence specialists, said the MoD civil service would be reduced to half the size
it was in 2005.
National secretary Steve Jary added that the announcement was ‘a bolt out of the blue’ that had not been consulted upon.
He said: ‘We are close to a fundamental breakdown of trust with officials. The department keeps announcing significant changes without any consultation, not even advance notification. The announcement is about what the MoD can afford, not what it needs. The reality is that the destruction of the MoD’s cadre of specialist staff will mean increased costs for defence, through poorer and more expensive equipment, and poses a risk to our armed forces.’
An MoD spokesman confirmed the plans. He said: ‘Tough decisions have had to be made to tackle the black hole in the MoD’s finances. Now, for the first time in a generation, the MoD will have brought its future plans and future budget into close alignment. One of the measures necessary to achieve this is to further reduce civilian staff numbers by an additional 7,000, expected to begin from 2015. Much of this will be achieved through reductions in recruiting and not replacing those who leave. Compulsory redundancy programmes would be used only as a last resort.’
Alongside the civilian reductions, the strategic defence review outlined plans for 17,000 military jobs to go across the three armed services – 7,000 in the Army, 5,000 in the Navy and 5,000 from the RAF. This has also since increased, with an extra 5,000 posts expected to go in the Army.
