Staff cuts will inevitably involve a quantity of associated costs, including redundancy costs, that the government will have to pay out. We questioned the Treasury as to what the total cost of these payments was likely to be, and although it explained that the number of required redundancies could be minimised by the large number of people who leave the civil service or retire each year, it told us that it did not know what the expected level of exit costs was likely to be at this stage.73 The Treasury also acknowledged that it did not have an understanding of how redundancies would be allocated, or if they would be targeted towards staff for whom lower exit costs would be involved.74