'It's always 5%' Chancellor's call for civil service savings will sound very familiar

Experienced Whitehall officials would have been forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja vu when listening to the chancellor Rachel Reeves this month as she laid out her plans to drive efficiencies from the civil service as part of her spending review.

- Kiran Stacey

"The previous government allowed millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to go to waste on poor value for money projects," she said, as she told departments to draw up plans for 5% efficiency savings across their budgets.

Rishi Sunak had a similar message when he launched his spending review as chancellor in 2021. "Your returns must... ensure we can provide a better service for the British public, at lower cost," he told his cabinet colleagues, as he demanded efficiency savings of 5%.

Six years earlier George Osborne also demanded that departments "deliver more with less" as he asked them to make annual cuts of between 3% and 6%.

A Treasury requirement for departments to save around 5% of their annual costs by delivering public services more efficiently is a feature of almost every spending review, to the extent that some in Whitehall believe the number to be largely fictitious.

"The Treasury always asks for somewhere around 5%," said one official. "The number seems to be hardwired somewhere deep in the Treasury brain without anyone knowing what it is based on."

James Nation, a former adviser to Sunak at the Treasury and now managing director at Forefront Advisers, said: "You will have read the 5% number before. In the three spending reviews I worked on, you always ask departments for efficiency savings of between 3% and 6% - but usually 5%.