Counting down

More up-to-date analysis of Civil Service staff numbers can be found on our blog. As of March 2014, there are 405,070 civil servants (Full time equivalent – FTE), down 73,060 since Spending Review 2010.

In the June 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan, the Coalition committed to reducing the size of the Civil Service by some 23% over the course of this parliament. The Government remains on track to meet this target – headcount has fallen for a third successive quarter. Our graph has staff numbers falling by 1,630 (from 406,710) from the last quarter, while the figures released today by the ONS give a fall of 5,620 (from 410,690). This is because they have revised the results for that quarter to include around 4,000 staff at the National Crime Agency, which became fully operational in October 2013. Both sets of figures arrive at a current level of 405,070. The only quarter since the Spending Review that saw headcount rise overall was Q2 (June) 2013. This was because two new executive agencies were created, meaning over 6000 employees were counted as civil servants for the first time. Even then, the underlying direction of change was still a cut. Departments vary in size – DWP has just under 90,000 staff, DCMS under 500.

Four delivery departments – DWP, HMRC, MoJ and MoD – are considerably bigger than the others. As we see below, they also account for most of the cuts in headcount in absolute terms. The departments are broken down into three components: • ‘Whitehall’ – the core department, which excludes arm’s-length bodies and other agencies • ‘Non-Whitehall’ – key agencies for which ministers in the department have responsibility, for example, Ofsted in DfE or the DVLA in DfT • ‘Departmental group’ – the sum of Whitehall and non-Whitehall civil servants. We use this category to give figures for the whole Civil Service, and also where the ONS doesn’t distinguish between core departments and their agencies. Within core Whitehall departments, staff numbers were down 1.3% in the last quarter.

The core Whitehall organisations made significant cuts early on following the 2010 Spending Review, and most have been relatively stable over the past few quarters. However, there have been some interesting cuts this time round. DECC, which has seen a rise in every successive quarter since Spending Review 2010 has actually seen a cut this quarter. It’s still seen a total rise of 38% since the 2010 review. DfID and the Cabinet Office, the only other departments to have seen an overall rise in Whitehall staff since the Spending Review, both saw their numbers increase last quarter.

In terms of other departments seeing cuts in Whitehall, Defra lost 170 staff (-7.9%) in the last quarter – down over 23% since the Spending Review. DfE lost 20 staff (-0.9%), having recently had a few quarters of consecutive cuts. Across the whole Civil Service, seven out of every ten jobs lost were lost at DWP, HMRC, MoJ and MoD.

As we noted above, the cuts to the Civil Service are mainly driven by those in the big delivery departments with large numbers of staff outside Whitehall: • DWP has reduced by 3,160 staff (-3.5%) • HMRC is down by 1,110 (-1.7%) • MoJ has cut 950 staff (-1.6%), many of them (830) at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) • MoD is down 630 (-1.1%).

Since the Spending Review 2010, those four departments have accounted for more than 80% of all staff cuts to the whole Civil Service. The DfT also saw a 1% cut over the last quarter, mainly due to a cut of 220 staff at the DVLA. The next set of figures – for Q2 (June) 2014 – is due to be published on 17 September 2014. Alongside this blog post, we have published the methodology and the underlying data we have used in our analysis.