No government functions will be exempt from the government’s plans to cut administrative costs, Cat Little has said.
Speaking at a Public Accounts Committee hearing on the condition of government property, the civil service chief operating officer and Cabinet Office permanent secretary was asked about the impact of planned cuts on the property profession.
“Clearly there is a government policy to reduce numbers of the civil service. Will property professionals be exempt from those cuts?” PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown asked.
Little said: “It's not a headcount reduction, it is a cost reduction, that was announced a couple of weeks ago. So reducing the administrative costs of the civil service is now being worked through as part of the Spending Review.
“And if we think it is better value for money and cheaper to employ more people and have less contractors or contingent labour on our books, then that is what we will do. But I think it's a bit early for us to say exactly what it means for each function.
“There won't be broad exemptions because we want to get into the value for money, and you need to look at consultants, contingent labour and cost overall, not just the number of civil servants that are on our books.”
Government's property function workforce has fluctuated in recent years, standing at at 7,095 (full-time equivalent) employees in 2024, compared to 6,950 in 2023 and 7,600 in 2022.
Little and government chief property officer Mark Chivers, who also appeared at the hearing, were asked if the government is targeting a specific total number of full-time equivalent property professionals.
Chivers said: “In terms of the number of people, not really. What we are doing is working with each of the departments in their workforce plans to build up that picture department by department – how many property professionals do you need to do your particular piece of work? So that will provide a bottom-up answer, but I don't know whether it will be 5,000 or 9,000.”
Expanding on this, Little said: “We're producing our first strategic workforce plan alongside the Spending Review, which we're hoping to bring together in the summer. That's the bottom-up answer to what Mark's just described, but we've also got to do the top-down to check that the supply and the demand and our forecast of what is needed is right.”
She added that the government needs to be assessing capability not just within the civil service but throughout the whole property supply chain.
The senior officials were also questioned on whether the Office of Government Property and the Government Property Agency, both agencies within the Cabinet Office, should be merged due to potential duplication.
Little said the Cabinet Office is "very serious about efficiency" and is "working across government to drive agility and strip out duplication across the whole civil service". She said this is "a personal priority" of hers, adding: "Wherever we find duplication or inefficiency we’ll want to make a change."
Chivers – who runs the OGP – said: "It is not helped by the fact that two of the words in the names, with their three-letter acronyms, are the same."
But, he added: "The roles are quite different: one is a delivery vehicle and my team is largely a strategy function".
'We need to get better at growing our own'
The PAC session aimed to answer questions raised by a National Audit Office report, published in January, which found that recruitment struggles in the property profession are affecting departments' ability to manage maintenance services effectively.
The report said the struggles were largely due to uncompetitive salaries, and were contributing to a rising maintenance backlog and poor maintenance of public service facilities.
Asked about departments’ ability to offer the necessary pay to attract specialist skills, Little said the gap between supply and demand in property is not as problematic as in the digital profession, and that “quite a lot of our most senior people in property organisations are paid above the civil service frameworks… because we're trying to buy in some very specialist property skills”.
Mike Green, chief executive of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, added that, in defence, there is an ongoing issue where officials with a “unique in-depth knowledge who've been around a long time…get offered twice as much money to go and work for somebody else and then come back and be rented back to you”.
“That is undoubtedly an issue which continues, but it's not end of the world stuff,” he said.
Green said he has come to the conclusion that “we therefore need to be better at 'growing our own', with the acceptance that at some point some of them will leave”. He said there was a “blip” last year in the function's ability to develop capability due to the introduction of a recruitment freeze, but that this work is now “back on track”.
Chivers added that the government has begun to “build some of our own”, pointing to the achievement of the 2025 target to recruit 300 new property apprentices and 60 property graduates, and the government being on track to achieve 90% accreditation of property professionals at grades 7 and above by 2030.