Lib Dems lament Whitehall redundancy costs
Government departments spent over £400 million on redundancies implemented in the wake of the Gershon Review, it has been revealed.
Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show the redundancies of two senior staff at the Treasury in 2006/07 cost £1.1 million alone.
A further 67 Treasury staff were paid “golden goodbyes” averaging over £220,000 each, written answers from ministers showed.
Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson Lord Oakeshott has questioned whether the payments are a necessary addition to the “generous pensions” received by Whitehall officials.
“The government has thrown half a billion pounds of taxpayers’ cash at civil servants to pay them not to work. The costs to the taxpayer are only too clear,” he said.
“The benefits are vague and stretching into the future. No business that runs its redundancy programme like this would last ten minutes.”
Plans to cull over 104,000 civil service jobs were announced by then-chancellor Gordon Brown in July 2004 following the Gershon Review.
But the Lib Dems’ requests to establish the cost of redundancies since then in the Home Office and Ministry of Defence (MoD) were dismissed with claims of “disproportionate cost” by ministers.
Lord Oakeshott attacked these departments for failing to provide the answers, condemning them as “totally incompetent”.
“No wonder the Home Office loses track of who to deport if it can’t even count its own redundancies. The MoD doesn’t seem to have a clue what 19,000 non-retiring leavers have cost the taxpayer,” he added.
