‘You can’t cut your way to growth,’ says PCS head as Rachel Reeves confirms move to lower admin costs by 15% by 2030

Rachel Reeves’s planned cuts of £2bn to government departments will hit frontline services from jobcentres to HMRC phone lines and efforts to cut the asylum backlog, a union has said.

On Sunday the chancellor confirmed plans to seek a 15% reduction in admin costs across Whitehall, amounting to about £2bn a year, by the end of the decade. She said this would also result in about 10,000 job losses in the civil service, although this was not a target.