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Hello and welcome to Coffee How Shots, the Spectators' Daily Politics podcast.

I'm Katie Andrews and I'm joined by our editor, Fraser Nelson and our politics editor,

James Forsyth. James, it's been going on for some time now, but yet again today, Jacob Reesmog has

taken a real aim at the civil servants in Whitehall. Now, not just calling for them to get back to

their desk, but suggesting that quite a few of them won't have a desk anymore. Talk us through

the latest update. So the government's plan is to take this service back to its 2016 size.

And I think the essential, this is the government saying that we're going to shrink

beside the cost which I'm trying to reduce the cost of government so that we can help people with

the cost of living by trusting their taxes. Now, this movie's obviously going to be controversial

because people will inevitably say, well, the reason the civil service has grown in size since 2016

is that it has had to do lots more stuff, not only because of Brexit, but also because of COVID.

So are you asking them to do more or with fewer numbers? And then the other problem you're going

to get to is people will say, well, hang on a second, everyone is criticizing the Passport Office

for being too slow and saying it needs more staff, not less. Now, I mean to take those arguments

in turn, part of the question about efficiency is, do these things like the DBLA and the Passport

Office work in the most efficient way possible? Are they using technology to the maximum degree

that they can? I think that is unlikely. And then I think the other question is, do we want the

state to be doing all the things that it is doing? And I mean, that is the bigger question that

the government needs repairs to tackle rather than civil service numbers. The state has expanded

...