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Lost in the post?

Professions in the Civil Service, 2010-15

As part of our continuing analysis of this year’s ONS (Office for National Statistics) Annual Civil Service Employment Survey, Ollie Hirst and Gavin Freeguard look at the professions of the various posts in the Civil Service. We are very grateful to the ONS for providing us with the relevant data.

The UK Civil Service is made up of 25 professions, of which ‘operational delivery’ is the biggest. It is important that government departments know which of the 25 civil service professions their employees belong to: it allows them to know what capabilities they possess (the work they do and have experience of) and to make better resourcing decisions – especially if what the department does fundamentally changes, or if there are to be further headcount reductions.

According to the ONS, across the whole Civil Service just under 57% of posts are described as operational delivery, compared to less than 5% in policy delivery positions. However, for 12.5% of posts – one in eight – we do not know what profession civil servants belong to, whether ‘Not reported’ or listed under the enigmatic ‘Other’ category.
We have grouped together the various professions into seven categories: operational delivery (corresponding to the ONS’s own category of this name, with the addition of tax professionals, programme and project management, and operational research); policy (policy delivery); corporate (covering posts such as Finance, HR and IT); specialist (professionals like economists, lawyers and psychologists); insight and analysis (including posts in economics, statistics, and knowledge management); and unknown/other. Under these classifications, more than 64% of Civil Service posts are in operational delivery of some sort, compared to almost 10% in corporate roles, and just over 6% in specialist fields. In five departments, we don’t know which professions more than 15% of their Civil Service posts belong to.
For five departments – MoJ and MoD, two of the largest departments, and DfT, DCMS and HMT – the professions of more than 15% of their civil servants are not reported or listed as ‘Other’.
Where we do know the professions of more than 85% of civil servants, we can see a group of departments where operational delivery accounts for the largest percentage of civil servants, and another made up of policy-heavy departments. In the former group are DWP (which has lots of frontline staff in job centres) and HMRC, while the latter includes Defra, DH, FCO, BIS and DECC, which all employ over half their staff in policy-related posts. Defra (science and veterinary), DECC (science and law) and DCLG (planning) employ a large percentage of specialists. Although data coverage has improved, in most departments it is difficult to work out what has changed since 2010.
We have more coverage now than in 2010, when the professions of more than 15% of posts were unknown in ten departments and 29% of all civil servants were of an unknown profession. But only five departments listed known professions for more than 85% of their staff in both 2010 and 2015 (DWP, DfID, DfE, DH and Defra), making it difficult to work out what has changed. While there has been a gradual improvement in the provision of professions data in most departments – notably in BIS, FCO and MoD – the continued absence of information for departments such as DfT presents an obstacle to a fuller understanding of what civil servants do. More concerning is the picture in DCMS and MoJ, which have provided less information in 2015 than in 2014. Finally, even where data is provided, it is not always detailed or useful; in 2012, for example, although DCLG accounted for all of its 1,820 staff, they were simply grouped under the Policy Delivery category with no further differentiation. In those departments where a more complete picture is available, it is possible to draw some observations:

  • Very few departments have apparently undergone discernible change in the balance of professions, despite (in some cases) a considerable change in role and size for the department.
  • The Cabinet Office and DfE appear to have been subject to multiple adjustments or reclassifications.
  • DfID has seen a marked increase in the proportion of its staff working in operational delivery posts (from 23% in 2010 to 36% in 2015) at the expense of policy-oriented positions (which have decreased from 40% to 22%).
  • The percentage of Civil Service posts in other fields – including communications and marketing, corporate roles, and specialist positions – has been relatively stable in most departments since 2010, although Defra has seen its specialist staff fall from 9% of its workforce to under 2%.

However, the lack of a standardised method of reporting and classifying professions across different departments means there is the potential for inaccuracy and inconsistency, in comparing departments and across years. Data published by departments themselves is also patchy.

The ONS isn’t the only potential source of professions data – this is also contained in organograms (organisational charts) published by departments themselves. However, only five departments report knowing both 85% or more of their civil servants’ professions (ONS) and published organogram data for March 2015. In DH’s case, the organogram shows more corporate and fewer policy staff (around 10% in each case), while there are major discrepancies between ONS and organograms at the Cabinet Office – the department ultimately responsible for the transparency and open data agenda – which classifies 20% of posts as other/unknown in its own organogram. This, and the lack of recently-published organogram data for many departments, underlines the poor quality of data that they could – and should – be using to manage themselves better, plan for the future and make any further headcount reductions intelligently. Civil service leaders need better professions data. The quality of public professions data could be much improved. From the figures collected from departments by the ONS, five departments do not list the professions of more than 15% of their civil servants. Only five departments listed the professions for more than 85% of their civil servants in both 2010 and 2015, making it difficult to analyse what has changed. There are disparities between the ONS data and that published every six months by departments in their organograms. The organograms do not always make it easy to compare across time, as some of the data – names of units within departments, the professions assigned to the same person in two different releases – is not consistent, and some departments have not published it at all for some periods. Of course, it is possible that departments hold and use better data than they are publishing – the quality and coverage of the public data suggests many cannot be using it to improve how they are organised. If so, they should be publishing it: David Cameron explicitly mentioned the publication of organogram data when he set out his transparency agenda in 2010. And all of the above assumes that the current ‘professions’ are the right way of classifying the Civil Service – for example, ‘policy’ is a broad term, and the professions listed by the Civil Service do not map perfectly onto those used by the ONS and in organograms. Better professions data would help departments improve themselves and learn from one another. This is likely to be particularly important following the Spending Review, where further staff reductions are expected. If departments do not have a good idea of what professions they employ, they may end up without the people they need to achieve their objectives over the next parliament.

Abbreviations for government departments can be found here.

Publisher
Institute for Government

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