Tories will cut thousands of civil service jobs, says Michael Gove

Civil servants face job cuts after the general election, a senior Tory warned today.

Shadow education secretary Michael Gove said thousands of posts in central government would go under a Conservative administration.

He spoke out after shadow chancellor George Osborne predicted that a "lower public sector head count" would be balanced by a "private sector recovery".

Mr Osborne's comments echo the view of Chancellor Alistair Darling who said last month that "inevitably as you get a rebalancing between the public sector and the private sector you will get a transfer of jobs".

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has also warned of "savage" cuts in public spending and his party says there will be job reductions in the public sector.

Mr Gove rejected Labour claims that teachers, police and classroom assistants would be axed under the Tories, who have not ring-fenced budgets in these areas.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the posts which would go would be "bureaucrats, civil servants and quangocrats".

He added: "We are probably looking at several thousand people in the centre of government who currently do a job, bureaucrats, quangocrats, earning hundreds of thousands of pounds that we would say farewell to."

There are about 84,000 full-time and temporary civil servants in London. Mr Darling announced plans in

March's Budget to move tens of thousands of civil servants' jobs out of the capital to cut costs.