The civil service is to cut jobs in order to make room for an expected influx of apprentices.
The service is expecting to take up to 30,000 apprentices by 2020, according to the PCS union. The Government has manged to time their drive to create more apprenticeships to coincide with a drawing down of civil service staff.
Inequality
However, increasing the number of apprenticeship placements in the civil service is intended only to ‘end inequality in the public sector’ the Cabinet Office said, not fill the hole left by departing civil servants.
Matthew Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, has previously said that more than 200,000 apprenticeships would be created in the public sector by 2020 with more than 30,000 of these places set to be in the civil service to encourage recruits from a wider range of backgrounds.
Influx
However, unions representing the civil service have said that they are worried that this influx of trainees coincides too closely with plans to downsize the service.
The PCS union said this shows the government is attempting to staff the civil service ‘on the cheap’.
