A huge 20,000 more public sector workers than expected will lose their jobs over the next four years, taking the total cull to 730,000, the government’s independent forecasters revealed yesterday.
In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility had forecast that the number of public servants being axed would be 310,000 higher than the 400,000 predicted at the start of 2011, bringing the total to 710,000.
But a lot of the redundancies had been “front-loaded” in response to budget cuts, with figures showing that about 80,000 public sector jobs were cut every three months between the first and third quarter of last year.
The OBR said that it expected this number to drop to 30,000 per quarter between 2012 and 2017, however.
While it forecast that 2017 itself would see public sector employment fall by a total of 30,000, because staff should be cheaper to hire by then, public authorities would be able to hire about 10,000 additional personnel. This meant that the net effect would be 20,000 job losses.
The grim forecast came as Chancellor George Osborne announced in his Budget that the coalition government intended to press ahead with plans to dismantle national public sector pay rates in favour of regional ones.
But union umbrella organisation, the TUC, said that the move would drive down wages in the most deprived parts of the country, adding that a 1% reduction in public sector salaries would hit local economies to the tune of at least £1.7 billion per year.
