UK: Spending Review: 144,000 government workers to lose their jobs by 2015/16

George Osborne said he did not want to “disguise” from MPs that “there will be further reductions in the number of people working in the public sector”.

The Chancellor told MPs that limiting public sector pay and...

ending automatic annual pay rises could limit job losses – but not completely.

The Office for Budgetary Responsibility was forecasting that 144,000 officials in central and local government will lose their jobs between now and 2015/16, he told MPs announcing the Spending Review.

He said: “I know that for those affected this is difficult. That is the consequence of the country spending far beyond its means. When I presented the Spending Round three years ago, I said then that around half a million posts in the public sector were forecast to have to go.

“That is indeed what has happened – and we’re saving £2 billion pounds a year, with a civil service now smaller than at any time since the war.”

Pointing out that he had said in 2010 that “job creation in the private sector would more than make up for the losses”, he said: “That prediction created more controversy than almost anything else at the time. Instead, every job lost in the public sector has been offset by three new jobs in the private sector. In the last year, five new jobs have been created for every job cut in the public sector.”

But Brian Strutton, the GMB’s national officer, said the cuts “will take total number of jobs lost in local government to nearly half a million since the election in 2010.

“This is more than half of the entire public-sector job losses. This has coincided with a three-year pay freeze. It really has been a dire time for local government under the Coalition.”

Official figures published earlier this month showed that public sector employment in the UK continues to decline, falling by 22,000 to 5.7 million over the first three months of the year.

Yet while the number of people working in councils fell, employment rates in central government departments picked up.

Employment in UK local government was 26,000 lower than in the last quarter of 2012, while in central government it was 13,000 higher.

This was partly explained by the increasing number of schools becoming academies, which changes their status from local government to central government bodies.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/spending-review/10144622/Spending-Review-144000-government-workers-to-lose-their-jobs-by-201516.html