Whitehall unions plan to fight back

Civil servants in London and the South-East were reeling today from the impact of Gordon Brown's Whitehall revolution.

Public sector staff in every government department were plunged into uncertainty as it emerged that many of their jobs are to be axed or shipped out to the regions.

Unions are planning a fightback, with the possibility of strike action in JobCentres and benefit offices, but many workers felt the moves were inevitable because the Chancellor has put his reputation on the line to push through reform. It is not immediately clear which ranks will face the axe but Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, predicted the real victims would be "teenagers and clerks, not the bowler- hatted Sir Humphreys". About 20 per cent of the 460,000 full-time posts in civil service headquarters will go during the next three years, with a further five per cent relocated to the North, Wales and Scotland by 2010.

In some cases staff will be reallocated to other departments, and voluntary redundancy and natural wastage will shed the majority of jobs.

Some workers will be allowed to move from back-office posts to frontline positions as the £21billion saved in administration is ploughed back into services.

The Civil Service has a range of schemes to avoid real sackings, with voluntary redundancies counted under a so-called Early Release scheme. In one, people who choose to stay on but lose their jobs are "priority movers" and can be on full pay while waiting to be moved to another department.

For some there will be compulsory redundancy, a prospect from which the civil service has largely been insulated throughout its history.

About 84,150 posts are in line for the chop by April, 2008, a figure reduced to 70,600 once staff are reallocated across Government. In a separate move, a further 20,000 jobs will be cut in English town halls and the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The senior civil servants' trade union The First Division Association estimated that up to 10,000 of the 104,000 scrapped posts will come from departmental headquarters in Whitehall and Victoria Street. On top of that, about 15,000 jobs are expected to go around London and 5,000 in the rest of the South-East.

The biggest losers are the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Work and Pensions, notoriously heavy with backroom staff. But the DTI and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have all been hit by deep cuts as a proportion of overall numbers.

FDA spokesman Jonathan Baume said: "It's worse than we feared. It's an enormous cut in numbers. I don't think this can be achieved without compulsory redundancies."

Of the 20,028 jobs that will be relocated out of the capital and South-East, the MoD will take one of the largest chunks with 3,900 moved to the provinces.

In the first wave, 600 jobs from the Off ice of National Statistics will go to South Wales, 250 from Defra will go to Yorkshire and 100 from the Department for International Development to Scotland. Clearly enjoying London's discomfort, the Chancellor announced he wants other regional towns to bid for the capital's jobs.

The mood in Whitehall was summed up by Stephen Johnson, who has worked at the Department of Work and Pensions for 15 years. "Morale is really low. A lot of staff are very upset," he said.

In the Red Lion pub, Whitehall's favourite drinking hole, Treasury workers were less forthcoming. "We don't want to talk about it because we are the ones who did it to everyone else," said one.