What horrors! How could this be?

The Guardian runs a piece from a civil servant. In which we are told of the horrors to come:

The omens aren’t good: we woke up on Saturday to a fawning interview in the Daily Mail, which confirmed Johnson’s incendiary plans to fix the cost of living crisis by cutting civil service numbers by a fifth, down to levels last seen in 2016.

At which point we do have a question. Was the country notably undergoverned in 2016? We can’t say we particularly noted that it was ourselves but that is the important question isn’t it? Or perhaps this one becomes even more so:

On my own patch, attempting to cut 20% of the workforce without a monumental and carefully designed change management programme would be a cluster bourach. Working from home accelerated the rollout of a lot of collaborative tools, and dealing with both Brexit and the pandemic has given us a lot of experience in working across silos to get things done. The minister I work for happens to be an actual human being, but my department is already struggling with its workload even after many of those efficiencies – what management wonks insist on calling “low-hanging fruit” – have already been found and priced in. There’s no question that cutting one in five of us would have a devastating impact on public services.

But if inefficiencies have been extracted, new tools - which presumably increase productivity - have been implemented, then don’t we require fewer civil servants than we did in order to gain the same amount of governance? That is what increased productivity means, after all. Gaining the same output from less human labour, or more output from the same input.

We do have some advice though. Cutting civil service numbers isn’t in fact the aim. Cutting what the civil service - government as a whole - tries to do is. Yes, there’s a certain irreducible minimum necessary to allow civil society - markedly different from the civil service - to work. But the proper task of a government is to slice, pare and surgically remove from its orbit those things that don’t need to be done by government.

Something which would make a 20% rollback in civil service numbers look very marginal indeed. We can but hope….