We need more job cutbacks in Government - Liam Byrne talks to the Post

Dec 2 2008 By Jonathan Walker, Political Editor

In his first major interview since promotion to the top ranks of Government, Birmingham MP Liam Byrne tells Political Editor Jonathan Walker why thousands of Government jobs must go.

Liam Byrne joined the highest ranks of Government in October when he became head of the Cabinet Office and Gordon Brown’s so-called “enforcer”, tasked with getting Government back on track after a difficult year.

The MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill was picked because of his organisational skills, honed as an entrepeneur in the private sector before becoming an MP.

But recently, he’s been in the news for other reasons - following the publication of a memo he drew up for officials, as a junior minister in the Home Office,

Called “Working With Liam Byrne”, it included instructions on how he likes his coffee and mid-day soup.

In his first major interview since taking on his new role, Mr Byrne admitted he had gone “over the top” in his demands to officials.

But he said he was concentrating on efforts to save £30 billion in the public sector, as the recession squeezes budgets - even if that means axing thousands of jobs.

He said: “Together with Yvette Cooper at the Treasury I’ll be helping lead changes to the way that we deliver public services, so they are much more in touch, much more responsive and dynamic, and they are even better value for money in the future.

“Because when times are tough, people rightly expect the Government to tighten its belt.”

Savings could be made by creating central IT and human resources departments in Whitehall, shared between a number of Ministries and Government agencies, he said.

“It could well mean job losses in the public sector," he concedes. "In some departments like HM Revenue and Customs and the Department of Work and Pensions, there have been really gigantic programmes that have reduced the number of public servants.”

Last year, 26,000 civil servant jobs were lost - but the Government still employs 488,260 people.

“We now have the lowest number of civil servants since 1945. That’s how efficiently Government now delivers. But the truth is that we’re probably going to have to go still further.”

Although he has a wide-ranging brief to imporve the way Government works, the reality is that he has very little power to make colleagues in Government listen to him if they don’t want to.

“The only force I use is the force of argument,” he said. “My job is about bringing the combined force of Government to deliver results quickly.”

His experience as the first “minister for the West Midlands”, a job he did for around 16 months, has come in useful. As the Government’s co-ordinator in the region, he had no formal powers and had to rely on his ability to “bang heads together” to get things done.

In fact, the regional role hasn’t quite gone away, as Mr Byrne now chairs a new committee for the regions of England, designed to help the country get through the recession.

He has urged the rest of England to look at how the West Midlands coped with the closure of Rover in 2005, when agencies and politicians formed a partnership to protect jobs and stop businesses going under.

“The arrangements that have been set up in the West Midlands are leading the way across the country now. We have a culture of working together in the region that was really brokered in the difficult days after the closure of Rover.

“That model of the Rover taskforce is what I built on when I bought together