The Department of Work and Pensons has announced that it intends to cut 12000 jobs over the next three years. The job losses come after a headcount reduction of 30,000 over the last three years which was achieved without significant numbers of compulsory redundancies. A spokesman for the DWP said that they were confident that the job losses over the next 3 years would not mean that staff that wanted to retain their jobs would be forced to leave. Unions blamed spending restrictions for the job cuts as savings of 5% must be made in each of the next 3 years with the aim of reducing overall departmental expenditure by over £1.2billion. Public and Commercial Services Union general secretary Mark Serwotka attacked the job cuts, saying that they were “purely about crude cost-cutting”, and that the reductions were another blow to a workforce struggling to maintain service levels in light of the massive cuts it had endured and “below-inflation pay increases”. He argued that the job losses would “do nothing to improve service delivery to some of the most disadvantaged in society”.