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Civil service numbers are slowly increasing

The latest civil service workforce numbers are slowly creeping back up, says Alice Lilly, despite a major fall at the Department of Health.

The number of civil servants grew in the last quarter…

2017 Q1 ONS civil service FTE headline

New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show at the end of March there were 388,700 full-time equivalent (FTE) civil servants – an increase of over 3,400 on December 2016. Previous figures suggested that the pace of civil service cuts was slowing, with a small increase in numbers to the end of December 2016. This latest increase is ten times as large as that.

…but the Department of Health has seen a significant fall in staff.

Health lost 460 FTE staff, 26% of its total workforce, between December and March. The department planned a staff reduction programme which was initially expected to reduce staff levels to around 1,300-1,400 by the end of 2016, but these numbers suggest some of those cuts have occurred at the beginning of 2017.

Elsewhere, 12 departments have seen staff numbers rise in the last quarter. Among these are Defra (where numbers rose by 6.9%) and the Home Office (1.7%), two of the departments whose workload will be particularly affected by Brexit. The Department for International Trade (DIT), another key Brexit department, also boosted its numbers by 140 staff over the past quarter.

And Health is one of two departments to have lost over 40% of their staff since 2010.

Health has lost 49% of its workforce since 2010 (in part due to the significant drop over the last quarter). DCLG has seen numbers dip by 42%. Another five departments (Defra, DWP, FCO, MoD, and MoJ) have lost over a quarter of their staff.

But a handful of departments have grown since 2010: DfID numbers have risen by 35%, while the Cabinet Office (23%) and DfT (6%) have also increased.

We finally have numbers for DExEU (sort of).

There’s been a lot of discussion this week about ministerial turnover at DExEU. This ONS release is the first time that the civil servants dealing with that change are reported under the department’s banner, rather than as part of their previous departments (for staff transferred in) or as part of the Cabinet Office (for new recruits).

However, some DExEU staff on loan from other departments are still listed under their home departments, rather than DExEU – and so, despite reporting 210 FTE staff, the ONS estimates that its overall headcount is around 350 (which is similar to the figure for FTE staff – 332 – that Permanent Secretary Olly Robbins gave to the Exiting the EU Committee back in March). This makes DExEU the smallest departmental group, by some distance (DIT, the next smallest, has 1,050 staff).

Finally, it’s important to note that the civil service remains 20% smaller than in 2009, and it faces the demands not only of delivering Brexit but also supporting the new minority government. The question is whether numbers will continue to rise.

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