The Ministry of Defence plans to cut up to 3,000 civil service jobs and impose a temporary recruitment freeze to help fund a pay rise for the armed forces, Sky News understands.
James Heappey, the armed forces minister, revealed the short-term pause on recruiting civil servants to a group of journalists on Friday as he fleshed out details of the pay settlement.
Defence sources separately told Sky News about a plan to reduce the size of the MoD’s workforce budget by 5%, which includes a target to lose 2,000-3,000 posts.
Official statistics put the total number of civilian personnel in defence at just over 60,000.
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The government this week revealed that the military would receive a 5% core pay rise as well as a £1,000 additional payment as part of a wider announcement on public sector pay.
But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that individual departments would have to find the money from within their budgets to cover the increase.
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Asked how the MoD planned to afford the pay rise, Mr Heappey said: “Well, there’s a combination of things that the department has done to fund this.
“We have frozen civil service recruitment. We’ve made some adjustments to the way that we’re balancing our budgets this year to fund it.
“And there’s some other things that of course, we’ve had to look at as being less important than making sure that our people are looked after, whilst they and their families are going through a cost of living crisis.”
“We’ve managed to make it work so that our people can be paid, and we can do everything that we need to do alongside it,” he said.
It is understood that the recruitment freeze would only last for a few weeks. It will then be lifted for “controlled recruitment afterwards”, a defence source said.
The minister said none of the cost-saving measures would impact on operations, support to Ukraine or plans to buy new equipment for the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.
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The 5% pay settlement for defence – on the surface – sounded less generous that pay rises for other public sector workers, including teachers and the police.
However, Mr Heappey explained that by including the additional £1,000 uplift it translated into a salary increase of 9.7% for the most junior soldiers, sailors and aviators.
For more senior ranks, it equated to a 5.5% increase.
He also listed other benefits offered to service personnel including subsidised food and housing – though military personnel have complained bitterly about the quality of both.
“So actually that 9.7% core pay rise for our most junior troops alongside the things we’ve done to ease their cost of living pressures means they’re actually one of the better rewarded in these public pay settlements,” the armed forces minister said.
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He was asked about a report by Sky News of service personnel resorting to food banks because of cost of living pressures.
Mr Heappey said he was only aware of one individual at an RAF base who was using food banks.
“My message to anybody else around the force – because we really don’t think that this is widespread – … if there are people out there, there is a chain of command with welfare officers within and they are there to help.”
