Brutal cuts, but not for some

During the last four years, Whitehall has spent millions of pounds paying off civil servants – with the Department for Education spending more than 13m on redundancy deals at its Sheffield office alone.

In the last financial year, it spent 5.7m paying off workers in South Yorkshire, at an average of 100,000 per employee.

Seven staff received bumper packages of more than 200,000, and, incredibly, the wages of those made redundant reveal many were awarded as much as four years salary to leave.

Even more shocking was the admission by Cabinet Officer Minister Francis Maude, that some deals elsewhere in the country were as high as six years pay.

These figures are staggering – standard redundancy packages are between one and two weeks pay for every year worked; to get six years pay most people would need to have worked for more than 150 years. Even with the increase in state pension age, that may be asking a little too much.

It is not the beneficiaries that should be criticised, it is the system that agreed to such grotesque golden goodbyes.

By the time it came to cutting back on the army of public sector management, there was little choice but to pay up on the terms that had been agreed previously.

The Department for Education said that the cuts to the wage bill will save millions of pounds each year, and, therefore, it will take less than 30 months to pay back the redundancy costs.

However, that is assuming that no other resources – such as consultants or paying the remaining staff overtime – are used to plug the gap. It also assumes that those staff won't find work back in the public sector, simply being paid from a different Government pot.

Thankfully, action is being taken to call a halt to these bloated cash deals – the Government has announced a new Civil Service Compensation Scheme which caps compulsory redundancy at 12 months and voluntary redundancy at 21 months.

The decision could not have come soon enough – although it will offer little comfort to those struggling to find work or facing the end of those public services that failed to escape the Chancellor's axe.