CABINET Office Minister Francis Maude launched a vicious onslaught on civil servants, their jobs and their trade union yesterday.
He pledged to scrap up to 120,000 civil service jobs.
PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka commented: ‘This plan is built on sand because cutting more than 100,000 jobs and allowing the pursuit of private profit to dictate what we do is entirely incompatible with providing the kind of good quality public services that we all rightly expect and demand.
‘Instead of seeking to blame civil servants, ministers should recognise that austerity isn’t working and, far from making our economic situation better, it is their political choices that are causing misery for millions of people in this country.’
Maude announced a long list of bash the civil servants measures.
He announced wide-ranging privatisation, a war on terms and conditions and the sack for ‘the bottom 10%’ of civil servants whose ‘performance’ fails to ‘improve’ within one year.
He added: ‘We need a civil service that is faster, more flexible, more innovative and more accountable in order to succeed.
He claimed: ‘The civil service of the future will be smaller, pacier, flatter, more digital, more accountable for effective implementation, more capable with better data and management information, more unified, consistent and corporate.’
He warned: ‘Under published plans the civil service will shrink from around 500,000 in 2010 to around 380,000 by 2015. It’s already the smallest since the Second World War.
‘Sharing services between departments will become the norm. This has been discussed for years. It is now time to make it happen.
‘Productivity needs to improve also. For too long public sector productivity was at best static.’
He said: ‘Services that can be delivered online should be delivered online and only online. Digital by default should become a reality, not just a buzz-phrase.
‘We should no longer be the prisoner of the old binary choice between monolithic in-house provision and full-scale privatisation.
‘We’re now pursuing new models, joint ventures, employee-owned mutuals, and new partnerships with the private sector.’
He condemned ‘the civil service culture’, claiming it is slow-moving and heirarchical.’
He went on: ‘In future many more civil servants will need commercial and contracting skills as services move further towards the commissioning model.’
He continued: ‘In the future performance-management will be strengthened by a senior civil servant appraisal system, that identifies the top 25% and bottom 10%, who will need to show real improvement if they are to remain in the service.
He warned: ‘Departments will undertake a review of terms and conditions to identify those terms and conditions that go beyond what a good modern employer would provide.’
Civil servants yesterday were shocked at the degree of hostility, even class hatred that Maude displayed, and pledged that they would answer his attacks blow for blow, and would not tolerate more mass sackings.