The confidential slide presentation made to ten senior officials by the top mandarin at the Ministry of Justice last month left little doubt as to the gravity of the situation.

In slide after slide, the message delivered by Suma Chakrabarti was unswerving: more than 3,124 jobs must go in the courts, 1,320 in the Probation Service, 2,672 in the Prison Service, 404 in the Tribunal Service and 506 at the department’s headquarters.

The meeting on September 28, two weeks before the Government committed further billions to bailing out the banking industry, provides evidence not only of the scale of cutbacks, but also the likelihood of similar scenarios across government.

Mr Chakrabarti’s presentation concedes that several policies will be scrapped, raising questions about the future of key schemes to tackle crime and administer justice.

Figures in the documents, seen by The Times, show a funding gap of about £1.3 billion over the next two years owing to “existing inflation and volume pressures”.

Closing the gap by 2010-11, creating a contingency fund for emergencies and allowing only £150 million for a fund to cover initiatives would demand savings of £900 million in two years, the slides show.

Court hearings over the future of children, and appeals by immigrants, are among the top targets for savings outlined in the document. At the same time, magistrates and tribunals are expected to increase productivity, to save £22.5 million and £5.5 million respectively.

The job losses, sources suggest, would force the closure of up to 100 courts and risk undermining the stability of Britain’s prison system.

The proposals will cause uproar and dismay within the legal profession, as they come only weeks after the disclosure of a £90 million shortfall in the courts’ budget.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, was given one of the lowest allocations in the three-year Comprehensive Spending Review last year, representing a real-term cut of 1.7 per cent.

Among a series of “quick wins” to recoup big savings detailed in Mr Chakrabarti’s presentation are the axeing of computer systems designed to manage cases in the family and civil courts and cut paperwork. One, the Electronic Filing and Document Management System, would save nearly £46 million if dropped.

Under the heading of “policy” savings are a series of initiatives to make further cuts in the legal aid budget, currently £2 billion a year.

These include controversial proposals such as “cost recovery on immigration appeals”, which could involve charging immigrants fees to mount challenges over refusal of the right to remain in Britain.

Judges have already spoken out against government policy to move courts to a “full cost recovery” system by which they are financed solely out of fees charged to litigants.

But the document indicates that far from taking such concerns on board, this programme is to be accelerated, generating £46 million.

A second highly sensitive proposal is to “reduce double representation in public law child care” – the hearings over whether a child should be removed from its home.

The plans for prison and probation services also involve saving millions by workforce reforms intended to reduce the prison service wage bill, currently 72 per cent of its total budget.

This follows a warning from senior Prison Service officials that unless action is taken, 90 per cent of the total budget will go on wages by 2012.

Under the proposals, about 3,000 jobs will go in the Prison Service and a further 1,320 in the probation services in England and Wales.

Mr Chakrabarti insisted that costs had to be reduced quickly. “We must avoid the most difficult politics, complex IT projects, introducing unproven processes, excessive use of consultants, large-scale restructuring and things that just take too long to deliver.”

Times Recommends

• Margot Fonteyn: In her footsteps
• Forget beautiful people, let's have wonky Brits
• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power