Dutch civil service to cut 25,000 public sector jobs using AI

Published: 06:37 EDT, 28 October 2026 | Updated: 06:39 EDT, 28 October 2026 At least 25,000 civil servants in the Netherlands are set to lose their jobs to AI. The cost-saving bid aims to save taxpayers €3.5billion (£2.9billion) a year - and comes under plans to cut around 15 per cent of all government jobs over the next decade.Police and defence will be exempt from the cuts, which are driven by efforts to improve efficiency as the country strives to save €900million from its central budget by next year. It comes after staff hired by the Dutch government has grown by 40 per cent since 2018, with the creation of 46,500 new roles. The Dutch cabinet, under prime minister Rob Jetten, will outline next year how AI will be used to make the civil service 'simpler, smarter and smaller' by increasing productivity. Eric van der Burg, the state secretary of the Netherlands, said: 'We cannot keep doing what we have been doing.'With too many rules, exceptions and procedures, we sometimes make it unnecessarily difficult for ourselves to solve problems.'He continued: 'Yet residents and businesses should be able to count on a government that does what is necessary. The Binnehof Parliament Building is pictured in The Hague in The Netherlands'In addition, we must make significant cuts to organisational costs. That is why we are going to make tough choices for a central government that really works: simpler, smarter and smaller.'Under the plans, ministries, inspectorates and implementing agencies could see a loss of around 60 per cent of jobs. Should the UK adopt the Dutch approach, around 75,000 people would lose their jobs in the civil service, according to Bloomberg. Governments across Europe are increasingly adopting AI in hopes of making work both more efficient and cheaper. Under Labour's previous government, former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer unveiled plans to use AI in efforts to save up to £45billion. It came after a Government experiment on AI last year - involving 20,000 civil servants across 12 major organisations - saved officials an average of 26 minutes a day.It showed how AI tools could free up Whitehall staff from 'repetitive administrative tasks' and deliver greater value for British taxpayers. The mission to utilise AI in efforts to make the public sector more efficient is one that has carried on under Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Bringing the adoption of AI under the responsibility of the Cabinet Office, Mr Burnham plans to establish a new AI Taskforce, supported by Kanishka Narayan, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. This will include plans to adopt AI across the civil service. It comes after the UK's civil service has expanded more than a third in the last decade - and currently hires more than 500,000 people. This is backdropped by a hiring surge during both Brexit and the pandemic, alongside pressures from rising interest rates on national debt. The Tony Blair Institute, set up by the former prime minister, claimed in a report published in July 2024 that AI could takeover more than 40 per cent of public sector tasks - saving a fifth of workers' time.Last year, Mr Blair described the civil service as a 'conspiracy for inertia' with a 'genius for absorbing the impetus for change and suffocating it'. READ MORE: JEREMY HUNT: Reform the public sector or tax the life out of the economy? It's not difficult to work out which is best for Britain