Tiers shed as regional government offices disappear

The regional tier of government will be removed at a single stroke on March 31, with the loss of nearly 1,500 civil service jobs – the equivalent of a small Whitehall department.

It was John Major's Conservative government that set up Government Offices for the Regions in 1994, as the link between national and local government. But the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has now declared that there is no such thing as regions, neither for planning nor any other purpose, and that there must be an end to what he describes as "the command and control apparatus of England's over-centralised state".

So who now will take responsibility for planning the regions' infrastructure or for holding local authorities to account for what they deliver? Someone has to be the driving force in deciding where much-needed new homes are to be built, or how the region should provide for its future skills and transport needs, and matters such as ensuring the safety of local authority child protection services will only be possible with continued external support and scrutiny.

This week, the remaining civil servants in Government Offices who have not already left voluntarily will receive their formal notices of redundancy. This gives them the dubious honour of being among the first civil servants in living memory to face compulsory redundancy – but, given the frantic rush before Christmas to pass the superannuation bill, which redefines the terms on which redundancy payments are made to civil servants, we can surmise that they will not be the last.

Why should anyone care? Democratically elected governments have every right to close down offices when they see no continuing need for their role, especially as, amazingly, this is one policy that actually was included in the Liberal Democrats' election manifesto.

What rankles is not so much what has been done, but how. Last July, Pickles issued a highly vitriolic press statement announcing the closure in which he characterised Government Office staff as "agents of Whitehall, to intervene and interfere in localities". This view was contested by many. The hurt that has been done to civil servants caught up in this process, who have served the public interest as interpreted by the government of the day, seems wholly unnecessary.

Had the announcement been made with grace and maturity, it would have been accepted in that same spirit. Instead, the politicisation of the process has continued, with hostile and inaccurate press coverage. Worse still has been the long, soul-destroying period of attrition since last July. Most staff were instructed to stop all work for central government departments, with existing commitments fulfilled and then "exit plans" prepared for all other activities. A few staff, such as those administering European Union grants, continued as before, but everyone else faced day after day of inactivity.

No formal announcements of the timescale for closure or the process by which it would be achieved were made until the autumn spending review on 20 October last year. Even then, no one knew the terms of voluntary or compulsory redundancy. Ever resourceful, staff volunteered their time to go out and work in other organisations during this hiatus. Anything was better than spending the days in a doomed office scouring the internet for jobs or CV toolkits.

For some, of course, there have been happy outcomes – some people have found new jobs in other organisations, occasionally on higher salaries, but often on very much lower pay. Other staff have tried to secure civil service posts in London, with huge additional costs in travel time and fares, rather than face unemployment.

For my part, I pressed the ejector button in January, when I left "voluntarily", under an option to take early retirement. The end of my 28 years' service was marked by a glorious evening in the pub with colleagues with whom I had shared so much – no leaving gifts allowed, in a self-imposed austerity pact, but the warmth of the memories and farewell speeches more than making up for material tokens.

I do not regret my decision to follow a path of public service, implementing the policies of the elected government of the day, whether I agreed with them or not. How much more satisfying than the alternative career in the City for which, as a graduate economist, I was qualified.

Despite the sacrifice of salary, I have benefited from family-friendly employment policies and I can also draw my hard-earned pension (considerably less, over a lifetime, I suspect, than one year's bonus in the City) with a clear conscience, knowing that it is not public sector workers, nor the previous Labour government, but bankers whose reckless behaviour has put us in this position.

And of course, the main trade-off I made in opting for a lower-paid, arguably more satisfying career, was the absolute security it offered. No civil servant, after all, would ever be made redundant – it just didn't happen, did it?