Thousands more Civil Service jobs will be lost over the next four years as departments struggle to find £45 billion in “efficiency savings” by 2013-14.

Alistair Darling will claim to be introducing a “Budget for jobs” today with a £2.5 billion package that includes a guarantee of work or training for every young person out of work for more than a year. The Chancellor will also back recommendations by five external advisers to find savings by cutting office space, selling property, privatising assets and sharing purchasing contracts across the Government.

The advisers recommend savings starting at £5 billion a year and rising to £15 billion annually by 2013-14. Suggestions include cutting office space by 30 per cent, through hot-desking, halving the size of the Land Registry and preparing the Royal Mint for whole or partial sale.

Today official figures are expected to show that the number of people out of work and claiming benefits rose by more than 100,000 in March. Unemployment, which has already surged to a 12-year high of more than two million, is forecast to rise as high as 3.3 million next year.

Mr Darling will vow never to return to the day “when a whole generation of young people is abandoned to a future on the scrapheap”. The Government will spend £1 billion on support, with extra Jobcentre staff giving tailored advice to people being made redundant. The new work or training guarantee will apply to people under 25. Mr Darling will say that the Government will work with local government and the social care sector to create as many as 250,000 jobs.

He is likely to extend the time that it will take the public finances to get back on course to as long as nine years today as he confirms that public borrowing has soared to more than £170 billion. He will also say that there will be a contraction in the economy of more than 3 per cent this year, while voicing hope that the recovery will begin at the turn of the year.

But restoring the public finances to health will be closely linked to the success of the Operational Efficiency Programme that will reshape Whitehall over the next few years. Details published in a report yesterday show that an estimated £7.2 billion a year could be saved by streamlining back office functions and reduced IT spending. Another £6.1 billion could be saved by joint purchasing by government departments and other parts of the public sector to drive down contracts.

Running government property more effectively, but maximising the use of space, could also save £1.5 billion annually rising to £5 billion within ten years, according to the report. In addition £20 billion a year could be realised by selling off buildings once more efficient use has been made of them.

A substantial but as yet unidentified amount could be found by better commercial use of government assets such as the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, the British Waterways, the Dartford Crossing and the Land Registry, according to yesterday’s report.

The unions have been alerted to plans to halve the 8,000 workforce at the Land Registry and thousands more jobs are expected to be lost by streamlining IT and purchasing services. Mr Darling announced in November that the first tranche of £5 billion to £6 billion identified by the programme would have to be found next year, with departmental spending cut by that amount. Spending has still not been settled for the following three years, but Whitehall sources suggested that departments would keep a proportion of the savings with the rest clawed back by the Treasury.

Officials said that the new efficiency programme would be in addition to administrative savings now set at 3 per cent a year between 2008-09 and 2010-11, which are likely to continue at a similar rate.

Although the scope to find extra savings may be difficult at first, departments will be required to save in total up to 12 per cent of their annual budgets, or about £45 billion, by 2013-14.

The aim is to save frontline services including hospitals and schools, but the five reviews suggest that projects in even these areas may be curtailed.

The latest efficiency programme follows separate initiatives to streamline back office staff and functions started by Sir Peter Gershon in 2005. The Treasury claims that more than 75,000 posts were lost across Whitehall and £26 billion saved after Sir Peter’s programme, but critics say that as posts have been cut consultants and managers have been hired instead.

Jon Sibson, government and public sector leader at PricewaterhouseCooper, said: “Big savings need to be made in support functions to avoid cuts in frontline services. We believe that these targets are achievable, and indeed that the Government should go faster and further in some areas.”

But Civil Service unions warned of substantial job losses and of privatisations. “This is a case of back to the future with Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation guru preparing the ground to sell off the family silver,” said Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union. “These so-called efficiency savings are spending cuts which we fear will result in people with bills to pay and mouths to feed losing their jobs.”

The International Monetary Fund has withdrawn a claim that the banking rescue would cost the country almost £200 billion. The Treasury had hotly contested the figure. Mr Darling will issue his own estimate today while claiming that government action had already saved 500,000 jobs and that his new measures would create 250,000 more.

The IMF’s latest stability report had estimated that the cost of bank support would run to 13.4 per cent of Britain’s entire economic output of £1.46 trillion in 2008. It is understood that a “prudent provision” for losses from the rescue to be made in today’s statement will be about £50 billion. The Treasury said that the IMF had based its calculations on American banking failures in the 1980s.

Mr Darling is expected to announce a “scrappage” scheme to encourage people to buy new cars. People with cars over ten years old will get a £2,000 incentive if they buy a new one. The scheme will also apply to vans. The Chancellor is also widely expected to set out further deferred tax rises on top of those included in November’s Pre-Budget Report.

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