Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a new podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and each week I'll be taking an in-depth look at the biggest political stories

with fellow Politics Home reporters and special guests from across Westminster. The government is once

again at war with Whitehall, with plans to cut up to 91,000 civil

service jobs to save money, with the aim to return to 2016 staffing levels within three years,

prompting threats of strike action from unions.

It is part of wider plans to shake up workplace culture as the economy tries to recover

from the pandemic, with the Prime Minister critical of what he calls a post-COVID,

work-from-home manana culture at some public bodies.

Meanwhile, Jacob Bruce Mogg, tasked with enforcing this new mantra,

has been dropping into various departments and leaving notes on empty desks,

a practice described by his own cabinet colleague Nadine Dorris as Dickensian.

Joining me this week to discuss that and more are three fantastic guests,

starting with Susanna Brecknell, co-editor of our CISC publication's

Civil Service World, Alex Thomas, program director at the Institute for Government, and a former civil

servant himself, as well as Labour's Justin Madder's, the shadow minister for employment rights and

protections. So starting with you, Susanna, can you just go through some of the plans that we saw

first leaked in a letter from the head of the civil service last week about the government's plans to cut, I think it's up to about a fifth

of the workforce in the next few years? It'll actually be quite quick because we haven't actually

had much detail yet. There's been no formal ministerial announcement of this. As you suggest,

we've just had leaks really, and we've seen this letter from Simon case, the cabinet secretary, asking permanent

secretaries to work up plans as to how they will start cutting the headcount. So what we know from

...