Civil service chiefs must force Whitehall departments to smash ‘a deeply-ingrained cycle of "siloed" working' to preserve staff morale and organisational capacity, a leading think-tank has urged.

Transforming Whitehall departments, a report published by the Institute for Government (IfG) on 7 November, states the 54,000 cuts in civil service staff undertaken over the last 18 months exceed what Margaret Thatcher's administration achieved during the first four years of the 1980s.