Civil servants admit they have nothing to do – it's time for cuts

Yahoo

10-02-2025

There are far too many bulls--- office jobs around. More than a decade ago, the late, self-styled 'radical anthropologist' David Graeber wrote an essay in which he argued that 'through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand'.
Graeber believed there were many professionals who, if you met at a party after a few drinks, would soon launch into a tirade 'about how pointless and stupid their job really is'. As a result, we are miles away from the 15-hour week that the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted back in 1930 would be delivered by technological advances.
Little has changed since Graeber wrote that essay in 2013. Productivity remains stubbornly low. Since the start of 2023, public sector output has barely grown 4pc despite a surge in hiring, while the private sector has not expanded at all. Andrew Bailey last week warned that Britain's bloated public sector is dragging down the economy after the Bank of England slashed its 2025 growth forecasts in half. 'We have got more population, we have got more labour force, we have got the same output, so you can only conclude then that you have got lower productivity,' he said.
In a nutshell, taxpayers are paying more for less. Although the number of civil servants has soared, public service productivity remains 8.5pc below pre-lockdown levels amid a collapse in output. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Government's tax and spending watchdog, believes public sector employment will continue to grow to 6.3m by the end of the decade. The message from Bailey was that Britain's growing public workforce is draining productivity – something radical needs to be done.
It's now clear that tinkering around the edges won't tackle the bloated state. Examples of unnecessary jobs are everywhere and nobody is being incentivised to cut the waste. Some civil servants admit online that they don't really understand what the point of their job is. 'I barely have any work to do, and I don't feel challenged at all,' one anonymous civil servant complained on Reddit earlier this year. Another wrote: 'Since I've started, I've had very little work thrown my way, and I'm struggling to understand what my role actually is. A lot of my responsibilities overlap with others who have been doing it for a long time'. A third said: 'This is the worst thing about the civil service. Being stuck in a boring job with nothing to do.'
There are plenty of jobs that could be cut or at least changed. Pamela Dow, a former civil servant, wrote in the New Statesman last year that there was a 1,000-strong 'Government People Group' with a £65m wage bill when she worked in the Cabinet Office.
Ed Miliband's Energy Department this month scrapped a £70,000 job post for an 'office attendance' monitor amid mockery online. The advert, which stated that the role itself could include remote working, was said to have been published by mistake, with a spokesman stating 'the job does not exist'. It was quickly removed after being posted, but the fact it was drawn up at all is ludicrous.
Ministers know they must cut down on this bloat. Departments have been told by the Chancellor they will not get cash for 'new priorities' unless they identify 'efficiency savings' of 5pc in their budgets as part of the spending review that concludes in June. Last week top civil servants were told that they could face the sack if they don't save taxpayers money, part of a series of reforms to how the civil service manages performance. Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has been tasked with creating a more 'agile and modern' state.
We have heard it all before. Last May John Glen, then-Conservative paymaster general, said that high performance in Whitehall was not being 'incentivised properly', and that pay should be tied to performance. Under the 2010 to 2015 coalition government, Lord Maude, the minister for the Cabinet Office, made cumulative savings worth £52bn, with new rules including limits on how much people could spend on either advertising or marketing without his sign off. Yet the change didn't stick – the state has bounced back and continues to grow.
There have been calls for the UK to set up its own version of Elon Musk's department of government efficiency – or 'Doge' – which has vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget (a target experts are sceptical of and Musk himself is starting to downplay). That may be more trouble that it's work – Musk's approach had already sparked legal, security and ethical concerns. Still, governments around the world are watching to see what lessons can be learnt.
In the UK, polls suggest voters want cuts in Whitehall but the savings can't come from slashing the civil service alone. Britain is becoming a sicker nation, with the number of people who are economically inactive due to long-term illness soaring in recent years. Tens of billions of pounds of taxpayer money will be needed to cover the UK's ballooning benefits bill between now and the next general election.
Investment in public services is desperately needed to tackle some of these issues, but it needs to be spent much more wisely than in previous years. The simple fact is that employment has been expanding in education, health and public administration, but productivity has plummeted. Now is the time for a rethink, and a zero tolerance approach to bull s--- jobs is a good place to start.
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