90,000 could go at civil service

The scale of cuts to staff in the civil service could be much more severe than was initially thought, it emerged today.

Yesterday Gordon Brown said 40,000 jobs in three departments would be axed, an announcement which stunned Whitehall and left civil servants reeling.

The axe would fall hardest on the Department of Work and Pensions, where 30,000 people will lose their jobs, with a further 10,000 moved out of London by 2008.

Customs and Excise will merge with the Inland Revenue, leading to 10,500 job losses and an additional 3,500 moving away from the capital.

But today Whitehall officials believe the final toll will be around 90,000 jobs lost. London's army of administrators will be squeezed hardest, with tens of thousands who survive the cull being relocated to cheaper offices in the regions.

"There is no doubt about it, this will change London dramatically," said one official. "We will see smaller headquarters with tighter teams of senior staff focusing mainly on forward-thinking and strategy. The transition is going to be painful."

Now the battle lines in what could turn into a long and bitter dispute are being drawn, with trade union officials hinting at the prospect of strike action.

Frank Campbell of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union,

which has 180,000 members in the government departments most seriously affected, said it had been suggested job losses were imminent since last July.

"There is a lot of talking to be done," he said. "In any period of uncertainty people will be anxious. It is now up to the managers to address the concerns that employees may have and give us assurances about pay and conditions."

Many employees whose jobs are threatened are refusing to take the bad news lying down. Many fear they will be unable to pay their mortgages if they are laid off, others do not want to be moved north.

One worker at the DWP said: "I have a mortgage, a new wife and a young child. It is stressful enough dealing with fatherhood without the worries about losing my job. I don't know how I'd cope if I suddenly found myself unemployed and unable to take care of them. It scares me to death."

The worker added he would be happy to move out of London but continued: "I'd be lost without an income. This office has been a pretty depressing

place today."

A project manager said: "I don't feel too concerned about losing my job. The DWP is a very big employer all over the country and I would be unlucky to be among those who are forced out.

"But I don't really want to leave London. I was brought up in an industrial town in the North and I spent my whole youth fighting to get out of there. I don't fancy getting relocated to some grim, decaying city just because property rents are cheap there."

John Bridgman, 51, from Ruislip, is a senior executive officer at the Department for Transport's head office in Whitehall.

He has worked at the department for 29 years and revealed that staff were told before the Budget that there could be 100 redundancies in the Whitehall office. Mr Bridgman said he has voted in favour of a strike in a PCS pay dispute ballot that closes tomorrow.

"There are already problems in the department, especially over the inflation increase for most staff, while the senior executives got large pay rises," he said.

"If voluntary redundancy is on offer, I'll take it. The Permanent Secretary told us the administration budget was being held and there would have to be about 100 redundancies. He hoped they would

be voluntary but we don't know how the Budget announcement will affect us.

"It may be more than the 100, and we don't know the timescale. But what will be damaging is if everyone at a certain level, expertise and age leaves and they're not replaced.

Then there will be whole sections with no staff to run them."

Most of the job losses will be in frontline services such as job centres, according to the PCS union, as many of the central administrators in the DWP, Department of Education and Skills, the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise have already been moved out of London. Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, branded the Budget the "day of the long knives".

"For thousands of hard-working staff to hear that they are losing their jobs totally out of the blue without consultation is unacceptable," he said.

Emphasising he was not against a "more efficient" workforce he said it is "difficult to see how services will improve with such swingeing cuts. If the Government is serious about tackling tax evasion, combating smuggling, achieving full employment and a skilled and educated workforce, arbitrary cuts in vital public services is not the answer."

The Department of Education and Skills will lose 1,460 jobs from its headquarters - a reduction of 31 per cent of the workforce.

One civil servant said: "To hear Gordon Brown announce in the Commons that so many of us will lose our jobs is akin to telling someone by text that they will be made redundant."

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, welcomed much of the Budget but stressed; "The down side is obviously the statement that civil service jobs may go as part of the package.

"Central government provides essential services that enable us to deliver at local level. We would not want anything to happen that would undermine the cohesion of public services."

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "The announcement of 0l service job losses had more to with shooting the Opposition's fox than acting as a responsible employer."

Additional reporting: Clair Weaver, Finian Davern, Dick Murray, Rob McNeil, Tariq Tahir