Boris Johnson warned his cabinet in Stoke on Thursday about the cost of living crisis: “Folks, we’re going to get through this… The answer is jobs, jobs, jobs.” Just hours later, it was revealed that nearly one in every five civil officials will lose their jobs.

Last October’s expenditure review, chaired by Rishi Sunak, established a goal of recovering Whitehall workforce to pre-pandemic levels by 2025; however, this new plan would return the civil service to its pre-Brexit size.

It’s only the latest in a long line of cost-cutting initiatives aimed at slimming down Whitehall. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tasked businessman Sir Peter Gershon with recommending methods to streamline the government sector.

When the report was released in 2004, one of his proposals was to cut more than 70,000 civil service jobs, as well as a large-scale redeployment from backroom to frontline responsibilities.

Civil service job cuts were a significant aspect of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition’s austerity agenda when it took office in 2010, promising to restore the damage done to the public finances by the global financial crisis (or, as they would have it, by Gordon Brown). Frances Maude was brought in to make reform suggestions.

During the coalition’s time in office, the civil service shrank dramatically, from roughly 490,000 in 2009 to less than 390,000 before the EU referendum in 2016.

As the layoffs became more severe, tensions in some departments increased, as did reports of seasoned professionals being rehired as consultants at a higher cost.

The Institute for Government’s Alex Thomas cites the Departments of Health and Defra as examples of departments where vital knowledge was lost in repeated efficiency initiatives and was later needed.

Of Defra, he says: “It was a department that had to rebuild quite significantly from 2016 onwards, and some of the people who really knew the ins and outs of EU regulations in the environmental and agricultural field were not there any more.”

Despite this, Johnson’s goal of 91,000 job cutbacks is ambitious. According to the most recent official numbers, the civil service employed 475,020 full-time equivalents in December, therefore success would result in 19% of them leaving the payroll.

The policy accomplishes two goals: it saves money at a time when Rishi Sunak is hesitant to loosen the purse strings, and it aligns with the Johnson administration’s ideological belief that the public sector is loaded with pettifogging remainers.