Former Cabinet Office minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Rishi Sunak of "not being interested" in reforming the civil service and wasting the opportunity to cut thousands of jobs.
Rees-Mogg – who was minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency under Boris Johnson, then business secretary in the brief administration of Liz Truss – said the Sunak administration had "bungled" civil service reform during its 20-month tenure.
The prominent Brexiteer never held a ministerial post in the Sunak administration, and went on to lose his Somerset seat in last month's general election.
Rees-Mogg was a supporter of the controversial Johnson-era plans to cut civil service headcount back to 2016 levels, first floated in May 2022.
Departments were instructed to spend the summer working up proposals for delivering on the reduction over the course of three years – which would have equated to 91,000 jobs. However, the effective defenestration of Johnson in July 2022 took momentum from the plans.
Sunak announced that the 91,000 job-cuts plan was being axed less than a fortnight after he became PM in October 2022. The enduring message from his administration was that the end of the target did not mean that there would be no job reductions.
Last October, then-chancellor Jeremy Hunt floated new plans to "freeze" civil-service headcount at 2019 levels, subsequently stating that departments would be asked to draw up plans for 66,000 job reductions over the next spending review period.
Nevertheless, civil service headcount continued to climb, hitting 510,125 at the end of March this year, according to the latest annual civil service statistics.
Speaking on GB News, where he is a presenter, Rees-Mogg last week suggested that cutting 91,000 jobs under the Johnson plans would have been easily manageable through "natural wastage". He said that Keir Starmer will face exactly the same pressures to reduce headcount in the coming months, and appeared to suggest that civil servants who have flexible-working arrangements are not getting any work done at home.
"You didn't need massive swathes being cut through, but you also needed people to turn up for work. And part of the problem is people simply aren't turning up work," he said.
"We knew how to do it: by not hiring, by working out there are some things you didn't need to do. We had a programme that was about to start. Bits of it were being put into place. And then, I'm afraid, Rishi Sunak’s government wasn't interested for about a year."
Rees-Mogg added: "A year was wasted doing nothing, and now we're back to the year of wasting.
"In a year's time, the government will see the sums don’t add up and it will say we have a big drive to cut back the civil service, and they won't do anything. The chance to do it was in 2022 and we bungled it, I'm afraid."
As a minister, Rees-Mogg was vocally opposed to remote working, famously leaving notes on empty work desks in government offices that said: “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.”