What do civil servants do?

The latest figures show that, as of December 2024, the civil service employs 547,735 people (or 514,395 on a full-time equivalent basis).

But while information on overall staff numbers – including by department, agency, region and so on – is readily available, it is far more difficult to determine what these officials’ specific roles are.

This is important because debates around the size of the civil service often refer to the ‘frontline’ or ‘back office functions’. Understanding what different types of civil servants do helps to inform debate around the size – and therefore cost – of the civil service.

Civil servants are a narrower group than public sector workers. Police officers, teachers, NHS staff, members of the armed forces and local government officers are not counted as civil servants.

The civil service ‘professions’  

‘Professions’ are groupings of officials with particular skills or knowledge, and serve as a means for developing skills and defining career pathways. Almost all civil servants belong to one of the 30 professions, though some belong to more than one. While an official’s profession will rarely loom large in their day-to-day work, they are still a useful way of understanding the shape of the civil service in broad terms.

The largest profession, accounting for more than 50% of all civil servants, is the ‘operational delivery’ profession. Operational delivery officials tend to carry out a very different type of work from the typical image of a ‘Whitehall’ civil servant – these are ‘frontline’ roles that include prison officers and Jobcentre staff. The IfG classifies the remaining professions into the following groups:

• Cross-departmental professions
• Departmental professions

We consider a profession ‘cross-departmental’ if the type of work is necessary in many or all departments (such as ‘policy’ or ‘digital and data’), while ‘departmental’ professions are those that are mostly concentrated in a single department (like ‘tax).

Most civil servants are in front-line roles

The more than 270,000 civil servants making up the operational delivery profession are concentrated in a few large departments. They represent most of the staff in the MoJ, DWP and Home Office (88%, 78% and 77% respectively), largely due to the number of prison staff, Jobcentre staff and immigration caseworkers employed by each respectively. Together, just these three departments make up 68% of all operational delivery officials.

The policy profession is the largest in our ‘cross-departmental’ grouping and is distributed in similar proportions across all Whitehall departments. There are, however, notably high proportions of the profession in Defra, DESNZ and the FCDO – more than 10% of the profession in each case – particularly given that DESNZ and the FCDO are some of the smallest departments in Whitehall.

The departmental professions are, by their nature, smaller. These are specialisms generally required only in a small number of departments, or in just one. The most concentrated departmental professions are tax, geography, and inspectors of education and training, which have almost 100%, 97% and 93% of their members in HMRC, the MoD and DfE respectively.  

By contrast, the legal, internal audit and counter fraud professions are the least concentrated. While most of their members are still to be found in single departments (the Attorney General’s Office, HMT and DWP), the rest of their members are spread across several departments.

The expansion of policy and digital and data roles – as well as front-line workers – has boosted civil service numbers since 2016

The growth of the professions sheds more light on how and why the civil service has grown in recent years. Since 2016, the operational delivery profession has added more than 57,000 members – accounting for 46% of the total growth in the civil service. The policy and Government Digital and Data (GDD) professions have seen the second and third highest growth in absolute terms since 2016, adding more than 17,000 and 13,000 officials each.

This looks slightly different on a proportional basis – the growth in the operational delivery profession since 2016 represents an expansion of 27%, for example, while the policy profession has more than doubled in size and the GDD profession has grown by 122%. 

A more detailed story can be seen by analysing trends in individual departments. The departments that grew the most in absolute terms between Q2 2016 and Q1 2024 were the Home Office, MoJ, DWP, Defra, MoD, MHCLG, DfE and the Cabinet Office. Looking at the professions data for these departments over this period shows how they expanded their workforces.

In half of these departments (HO, MoJ, MoD and MHCLG), operational delivery expanded more than any other profession. While more granular staffing data (and therefore the precise reasons for the expansions) are not available, in the Home Office and MoJ at least this would appear to indicate a response to well-documented pressures on front-line services, from prisons to immigration services. In the case of MHCLG, the expansion in the operational delivery profession reflects the move of HM Land Registry into the departmental group in 2023. And in the case of the MoD the expansion is likely to be an artefact of poor data availability.

The policy profession also expanded markedly, particularly in Defra (in large part to assist the post-Brexit functions now administered by the department), MHCLG and the Home Office. In the latter case, this could also reflect the UK government beginning to administer functions previously carried out by the EU, as well as the focus on immigration and asylum policy in recent years. The growth of the policy profession in MHCLG, meanwhile, appears to be explained by the move of teams responsible for the union and devolution from the Cabinet Office to MHCLG. The date of this move coincides with the addition of 580 policy staff between 2021 and 2022. 

The GDD profession has also contributed significantly to the growth of these departments since 2016, most notably the Cabinet Office, MoJ and MoD. Some trends, meanwhile, are specific to a single department. The counter fraud profession, for example, was established in 2018 and now represents 7% of DWP, the second largest department in Whitehall, with almost 5,700 counter fraud staff in the department.

Data on the professions is far from perfect

This data on the professions provides only a rough overview of what the almost 550,000 officials employed by the civil service do. Many professions will group together officials doing a vast array of tasks – those staffing the private offices of ministers, for example, are likely to be classified as ‘policy’ officials even though they do not develop policy.

These figures also rely on officials self-reporting their professions in an annual survey. Historically, many have not reported their profession. This can create distortions in the data – for example, an increase in reporting is indistinguishable from a true increase in the numbers of officials in a certain profession.