Over 1 Million Public Sector Jobs in the UK Will Face Axe Through 2020: Report

Over the next five years, as many as 1 million jobs in the public sector in the United Kingdom will face the axe, as budgetary restrictions continue to squeeze tighter. The country’s government has already scaled down the number of public sector employees by one fifth since it began effecting these job cuts four years ago, in 2010.

However, according to the Office of Budgetary Responsibility the worst is yet to come, as far as job cuts in the public sector are concerned. According to these estimates, by the time we ring in 2020, the number of people employed in the UK’s public sector would have fallen by at least 1 million, taking the total number of job cuts to 1.3 million.

However, it is not just job cuts that civil servants will have to worry about. George Osborne stated recently that since 2010, the state had saved nearly GBP 12 billion through a freeze on the salaries of public sector employees in two years and a 1% rise in their salaries. Osborne recently stated that he was positive of reporting similar savings during the next parliament.

According to some officials, this could potentially mean that over the next four years, public sector employees will likely have to forgo any increase in their pay. These salaries, when adjusted against inflation, already show a slide by 1/10th since the 2008 recession. Concerns are now being raised about how these measures could de-motivate public sector employees and could affect the ability of public sector establishments to carry out their tasks efficiently.