One in five justice jobs at risk

The PCS civil service union has warned that 15,000 of the 80,000 staff at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) could be at risk of losing their jobs.

The warning follows an announcement that the department has to make £2 billion worth of cuts from its £9 billion annual budget.

As the MoJ is the first department to agree the actual scale of the cuts, the PCS is expecting more bad news to come. General secretary Mark Serwotka said: “This is the first indication of the true scale of the cuts being imposed upon departments by this coalition government, and it paints a devastating picture.”

According to the PCS, the cuts are equivalent to the entire budget for prisons, or the money the department spends each year on courts and tribunals. And it warned that cuts on this scale cannot be delivered without closing prisons and bringing courts to a standstill.

“It is clear that the civil service will simply not be able to cope,” Serwotka warned. The union “will take every opportunity to remind the government and the public that there is an alternative and that these politically-motivated cuts are entirely avoidable”, he said.