Unions have criticised the Conservative Party’s latest pledge to slash the size of the civil service as “cheap” and “not serious”.
In a speech opening the Conservative Party conference yesterday, Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, announced that the party, if it wins the next election, would bring civil service headcount down to 2016 levels. Stride said the return to pre-Brexit numbers would save £8bn.
The full-time-equivalent civil service headcount was 384,000 in September 2016, three months after the Brexit referendum. It was 517,000 as of June 2025, according to the most recent Office for National Statistics update in September.
Responding to Stride’s speech, FDA general secretary Dave Penman questioned the logic of making the announcement now, with the next general election several years away.
"Arbitrarily determining what size the civil service should be in five years’ time based entirely on the circumstances 15 years ago is not the sign of a serious government in waiting,” he said. “It is simply rehashing the failed policies of the previous government.
"If the Conservative Party want to be taken seriously on civil service reform, they need to say how they’ll govern and improve public services with thousands of fewer prison officers, border staff, defence staff and tax collectors."
PCS and Prospect, meanwhile, both pointed out that there were good reasons why the size of the civil service has risen since 2016.
Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said: "The civil service was massively underfunded and under-resourced in 2016 – a point recognised even by the Conservative government at the time. It must have somehow escaped the Tories' attention that since Brexit, the UK government has taken back control of large areas of policy – from trade to farm subsidies – and that requires civil servants to administer.”
Steve Thomas, deputy general secretary of Prospect, said: “Once again the opposition is seeking cheap headlines by talking down the civil service. They frequently cite the arbitrary target of '2016 levels', not taking into account that much of that extra headcount has been to service the increased workload required by Brexit.
“What they have never done is identify any of the things they want government to stop doing and how this would impact the public. Areas of the civil service are already facing a recruitment and retention crisis – cuts on the scale the Conservatives are talking about would be catastrophic to the civil service’s ability to function.”
The size of the civil service has risen every year since 2016, driven by demands including the UK’s decision to leave the European Union and the need to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. In May 2022, the then-prime minister Boris Johnson announced plans to cut 91,000 jobs and bring the headcount, then at 475,000, back down to 2016 levels.
A year-and-a-half later, the Sunak administration announced a new headcount target – to bring it down to 2019 levels, in other words to the level before the Covid-19 pandemic. At that point, the civil service headcount had reached 489,000. By the time Sunak’s administration was ousted at the July 2024 general election, civil service headcount had risen to 513,000.
The Conservatives' latest announcement doesn't go quite as far as Reform UK. Zia Yusuf, head of the party's "UK Department of Government Efficiency" said in August the party would fire "the majority" of civil servants.
Starmer’s government has set no overall headcount reduction target but this year’s Spending Review asked departments to find 16% in administration budget savings by 2029-30 and 5% in total savings and efficiencies by 2028-29, with these funds to be repurposed for core priorities. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in an interview earlier in the year that the government's efficiency plans could lead to headcount dropping by around 10,000.