When institutions change faster than anyone wants to admit, there’s a certain kind of silence that falls over them. This morning, there are no changes to the way the Cabinet Office on Whitehall looks. The pale Portland stone and security bollards are still there. The building still goes down the block like a long, slow sentence. On the inside, though, about 1,200 jobs are going away. Another 900 are being moved to different places. “A leaner and more focused” state is the official explanation, which does a great job of not saying what’s really going on.
The British government is automating its work. Ministers have promised to use AI to make government work more efficiently, cut costs by 15% by the end of the decade, and cut the number of people working in each department. A top cabinet minister named Pat McFadden told the BBC earlier this year that “the central civil service would and can become smaller.” He wouldn’t say by how many. It’s kind of an answer that no one in the government wants to put a number on it.
The size of the workforce in question is pretty big. The Whitehall Monitor report from the Institute for Government says that as of early 2026, the civil service employed about 520,440 people. That number had gone up a little, by about 1%, even though recruitment freezes were supposed to keep it the same. It turns out that freezes are blunt tools. People go. Roles are filled in again. They find ways to get around problems. The machinery doesn’t want to be fed. So now the government is trying something smarter: they are not only hiring fewer people, but they are also changing what those people do and giving some of it to machines.
The most well-known example so far is the reorganization of the Cabinet Office, but it won’t be the last. There are signs from ministers that a lot more than 10,000 jobs could be cut in the next few years. The Cabinet Office alone needs to save more than £110 million a year by 2028. This will be done by reorganizing, ending programs that aren’t needed, and, yes, “better use of artificial intelligence and technology.” In writing, it makes sense. This is always the case before the details come in.
The difference between what people want and what they can do is what makes this moment feel truly uncertain, not just politically awkward. In the past month, Rachel Reeves said that Britain would be “the fastest adopter of AI in the G7.” HM Treasury was also looking for a Chief Technology Officer around the same time, with a salary range of £69,820 to £74,000. In one of the government’s most powerful departments, that person would shape how technology works. At that level of pay, the Treasury isn’t up against Anthropic or Google DeepMind.
It’s not even close to being able to compete with mid-level management at a high street electronics store. The absurdity was pointed out by Arthur Kay, a board member at the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Treasury pays its chief technology officer about £400 a day, but then spends up to £5,500 a day on management consultants from companies like BCG and Bain to fill in the gaps that poorly paid technologists couldn’t fill.
This is the real problem that lies beneath the numbers. The government is laying off workers, but they don’t have enough technical experts to build or even test the AI systems that will replace them. Every year, the government spends £26, billion on technology and data. Most of that money goes to contractors, managed service providers, and consulting firms. Nesta, a think tank for new ideas, calls this the “tenant state”—a government that pays rent to use its own systems and data. Some departments are stuck with the same suppliers. Without expensive integration work, systems can’t talk to each other. And the people who could fix this from the inside are getting paid so little that it wouldn’t even pass muster at a local bank.
The contradiction has been seen by union leaders. Mike Clancy of the Prospect union said that cutting budgets for administration may sound like an easy way to save money, but it doesn’t take into account the important jobs that those budgets do. “Reform should start with a conversation about what the government wants the civil service to do,” he stated, “not just what it wants it to cost.” It seems like the savings goals came first and the reform plan is being made to fit them, not the other way around.
At the same time, it’s still surprisingly hard to say who is actually in the office. Some departments say that the space is up to 100% occupied, but that only means that the desks are full and no one is actually there. Even though there were 571 desks for almost 3,000 employees, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said it was fully occupied in early 2026. You need to change what “in the office” means for the math to work. It’s a small thing, but it shows a bigger problem: the government isn’t very open about its own workforce, even though it says it will completely change that workforce with technology.
There are no good reasons to say that the civil service should stay the same forever. When it really makes public services better, automation is something that should be looked into. However, automating a system that you don’t fully understand, that is run by data you don’t own, and that is staffed by people you can’t properly pay is not modernization. It costs a lot to speed up problems that are already happening. So long as Whitehall won’t say exactly how many jobs are being cut and what will be replaced, it’s hard not to wonder if the silence is on purpose or just because no one knows the answer yet.
