The Ministry of Defence is planning to cut 7,000 civilian jobs, which could include IT jobs, in an effort to cut costs.
The plans were revealed by The Guardian, which has seen a letter signed by permanent secretary of the MoD Ursula Brennan, which is being sent to all staff explaining why the cuts are necessary.
The latest jobs cull is on top of defence secretary Liam Fox’s plans announced last week to cut 7,000 military jobs between 2015 and 2020.
A spokesperson for the MoD said: “It’s a broad brush figure [at this stage]. There aren’t any areas particularly being targeted or not targeted.”
However, the trade union Public and Commercial Services (PCS) said that while there are no targeted IT redundancies in the MoD at the moment, there has been general trawl for people across the department to volunteer for redundancy.
A spokesperson for the union said that 5,500 people are understood to have done deals under the trawl.
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“My colleagues who deal with the MoD think that it is bound to include some people who work in IT - but we don't have figures,” the spokesperson said.
According to The Guardian, Brennan’s letter states: “In the SDSR we planned for...a 25 percent reduction in the cost of civilian personnel by 2015, bringing the size of the MoD civil service down to a total of some 60,000 civilian posts.
“As part of the package announced last week we need to make further reductions in...civilian manpower. For civilians, we will be extending the earlier planned reductions, coming down to a total of 53,000 civilians by 2020”.
The MoD expects most of the job cuts to come through “natural wastage” with compulsory redundancy being a “last resort”.
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