There is news that the UK government wants to reduce the civil service by about 65,000 which is almost 15% of the work force. This question is not about the politics of that, but about the practicalities.
My understanding is the a civil service should be a job for life type environment. Obviously you can always lose your job for poor performance reasons, but it should not be possible for purely political reasons. In the UK apparently the number of civil servants rose during the pandemic and they now want to cut it back. Does that mean the persons employed during covid are on short term contracts or how can they be cut? If they are on short term contracts, are they really counted as civil servants? In my view they are not.
So my question: how do you remove 15% of your workforce if you can't simply lay people off like a private company could?