Reform UK will sack Civil Service bosses and axe almost 70,000 officials if it wins the next election, the party has pledged.
Danny Kruger said there will be ‘real change’ among the ‘Permanent Secretary class’ if Nigel Farage becomes the next prime minister.
It came as the Reform MP announced plans to slash 68,500 civil service jobs, cutting the salary bill by 17 per cent and saving taxpayers an estimated £5.2billion a year.
The party has vowed to slash the ‘bloated, overstaffed’ Civil Service by cutting Human Resources (HR) staff by 67 per cent and policy officials by 50 per cent.
Reform emphasised that the first phase of its Civil Service reforms will not impact frontline roles, including border force officers, DWP assessors and HMRC tax investigators.
Instead the party has pledged there will be ‘no more woke, no more DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), no more bloat, no more fat cat middle managers doing nothing’.
Mr Kruger, the head of Reform’s ‘preparing for government’ unit, said: ‘We clearly can’t replace the whole Civil Service, nor would we want to. There are very good people in there…. But I do anticipate quite significant change at the top of the Civil Service.
‘It is unacceptable that the Permanent Secretary class that has run our country for so many years, through all these changes of government, could have presided over a collapse of productivity and in the terrible outcomes and the waste that we’ve been seeing.
Danny Kruger announced Reform’s plans to slash 68,500 civil service jobs, cutting the salary bill by 17 per cent and saving taxpayers an estimated £5.2billion a year
Mr Kruger with Reform leader Nigel Farage after his defection from the Conservative Party in September
‘So I think there is real change coming at that level, and part of that will be bringing in people from outside to take those roles and to give ministers more authority to appoint and to dismiss the people who advise them.’
The proposed cuts will see a £4billion reduction in salary costs and £1billion in reduced pension contributions, with further cuts to Quangos to be announced later, Mr Kruger told a press conference yesterday.
He added that he expected the cost of Civil Service redundancies to pay for itself within two years, based on it costing about £60,000 to let someone go.
Reform has also pledged to increase the bonus pot to reward ‘high-performing’ civil servants from £100million to £500million instead of giving them ‘over-generous’ pension contributions.
The party first announced its review of the Civil Service in October as Reform said the number of officials had increased by a third over the past ten years to 540,000 staff.
In October Mr Kruger said Reform would cut the Civil Service to ‘levels it was at before Brexit’ – equal to a reduction of about 140,000 people – which is more than double the 68,500 figure announced yesterday.
At the press conference on Monday Mr Kruger said that Reform is ‘looking at closely’ Civil Service membership of trade unions in a move that would ignite a war between the party and union barons.
He added: ‘We will not allow union agreements made in a different era to obstruct the changes that we want to make, so there might need to be some renegotiations of terms and conditions along those lines.’
Responding to Reform’s plans Dave Penman, the General Secretary of the FDA union, said that it was ‘encouraging’ that the party recognises civil servants’ ‘frustrations and their desire for change’.
‘However, the idea you can slash swathes of ‘corporate functions’ while protecting front line services in the likes of HMRC, the Border Force, and prison service is unrealistic,’ he added.
‘Serious government is about recognising the impact of decisions even when this becomes politically inconvenient.’
A Labour spokesman said that Mr Farage had ‘consistently promised massive savings but failed to deliver them in any of the councils’ Reform runs’.
They added: ‘In contrast, this Labour government has cut wasteful spending on government credit cards by two-thirds, halved spending on expensive consultants, and is cutting administrative spending so we can invest in frontline services.’
