Government Office closure threatens 200 jobs

SOME 200 jobs are expected to be lost in the region following the coalition Government’s decision to scrap the Government Office for the North West.

The office, which carries out the work of 13 different government departments in the region, has employees spread across several floors of Bruntwood’s City Tower scheme and at the Cunard Building in Liverpool.

However, the Department for Communities and Local Government secretary Eric Pickles last week announced plans to close regional offices in eight English regions.

“I do not believe the arbitrary government regions to be a tier of administration that is efficient, effective or popular,” he said.

“The case for elected regional government was overwhelmingly rejected by the people in the 2004 North East Referendum. Unelected regional government equally lacks democratic legitimacy, and its continuing existence has created a democratic deficit.

He described the Government offices as “agents of Whitehall to intervene and interfere in localities” rather than bodies which give a voice to regional issues.

“They are a fundamental part of the ‘command and control’ apparatus of England’s over-centralised state.”

The Government Office for the North West was due to relocate its staff to the proposed new Mayfield campus near Piccadilly station next year. Its staff would have been the first of an expected 5,000 civil servants moving into an area which has been dubbed the “Whitehall of the North” by city chiefs.

A DCLG spokesman said that a decision to relocate thousands of civil service jobs to the new Mayfield campus should be “unaffected” by the closure of regional offices.

“One of the issues we’re looking at is whether to redeploy some of these functions to London, to Mayfield or to another part of the country,” he said.

A decision on where many of the posts will eventually be relocated will be announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review due later this year.