UK will slash civil service jobs and use AI to boost efficiency

London: The UK will slash the number of civil servants and use artificial intelligence (AI) to boost efficiency in the government, a senior Cabinet minister said.

“The central civil service would and can become smaller,” Pat McFadden said in a BBC television interview on Sunday (Mar 9) ahead of major reforms of Whitehall that will be unveiled this week. He didn’t give the number of jobs that could be reduced.

The Labour government will launch a digitalisation drive, which will see 10 per cent of all civil servants employed in a digital or data role in five years, according to a separate statement issued by McFadden on Sunday. “No time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality,” he said in the statement.

Under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Labour-led government has made increasing productivity a key priority as it seeks to repair a hole in its finances amid anaemic growth. The shake-up of the civil service will accompany plans to cut spending by the government that Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is expected to unveil in her spring statement on Mar 26.

Brexit and Covid-19 led to an increase in hiring by the government, McFadden said on BBC. The reduction in the size of the state is aimed at getting “bang for our buck” and it is not “an ideological approach to stripping back the state”, McFadden, one of the most senior members of the Labour government, added.

The government will also introduce “a package of welfare changes” to address the increasing number of people dependent on state benefits. “It’s not fair on the taxpayer,” McFadden also said on Sky News on Sunday.

The government plans to slash more than 10,000 jobs in the UK’s civil service and make swathes of voluntary redundancies after headcount in the civil service ballooned to over 513,000 last year, a 34 per cent increase on 2016 levels.