Former public sector staff have been warned to find new jobs in the private sector quickly to avoid being unemployed for too long, in a briefing paper from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

IFS have also questioned whether the estimated 800,000 government employees forecast to lose their jobs between 2014/15 and 2018/19 have the right transferable skills to be hired by private sector bosses.

The researchers said the government workforce had fallen by 375,000 from 2010 to the end of 2014. However, since 2011 this decline had been accomplished without increasing unemployment levels because more public sector workers found jobs in the private sector, fewer private sectors joined the public sector and a somewhat lower level of government job cuts.

Luke Sibieta, programme director at the IFS and co-author of the report, said: 'Given the historically large cuts to the public sector workforce over the last parliament, it is encouraging to see increases in the numbers of public workers managing to find new jobs in the private sector.

'With the pace of workforce cuts set to accelerate in the coming years, the capacity of the private sector to absorb former public sector workers will need to increase further to prevent them spending a significant amount of time out of work.'

In response, Cllr Claire Kober, chair of the Local Government Association’s (LGA's) resources board told The MJ cuts to the local government workforce between 2010 and 2014 totalled 574,000.