Gordon Brown can't count

GORDON BROWN was accused of ignoring the facts last night after he said in a Times interview that he was presiding over a cull of 80,000 civil servants.
The Chancellor boasted that he had instigated sweeping job cuts in Whitehall to underline his credentials as a reformer. But the Conservatives said all the evidence showed that he had actually managed to create more bureaucrats since the Gershon Review he set up recommended a major redundancy programme.

“Gordon Brown either doesn’t know the truth about what is going on in Whitehall or isn’t prepared to accept the truth,” said George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor.

“The Gershon Review has the aim of reducing 80,000 jobs from the Civil Service by 2007. However, the latest figures suggest that Mr Brown is way off reaching this target and is actually creating, not cutting, costly bureaucrats from the Government payroll.”

In the first 15 months of his drive to cut 84,150 jobs, the number of full-time Civil Servants has fallen by only 1,000. On a simple headcount, which treats full-time and part-time jobs as the same, there are now more civil servants than when the efficiency drive began.

The headcount rose to 570,000 at the end of the second quarter of 2005, from 569,000 at the start of April last year, when the Treasury committed itself to savings identified in the Gershon review.

Other figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show that there has not been a single redundancy of a full-time employee in the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Education and Skills since mid-2004.

The efficiency review, which was chaired by Sir Peter Gershon, ordered the Home Office and the Education Department to cut about 2,000 staff. The Foreign Office was told to cut 310. The largest number of job cuts was to be at the Department for Work and Pensions, which was told to lose 30,000. It admitted that no full-time employees had been made redundant since last summer. About 900 staff had retired early and 300 part-timers accepted voluntary redundancy.

In his interview Mr Brown said that his record showed he had been at the heart of Labour reform since 1997, and his actions showed that he would be no softer than Tony Blair on the public services.

Mr Osborne said: “There are nearly 6 million people working in the public sector which is growing 70 per cent faster than the private sector. Earlier this week, the Government revealed it was £200 million over its administration budget while the number of administrators has increased by 17,000 in the last year alone.”

The Times Deputy Political Editor by Rosemary Bennett