Whitehall Monitor 2026

Watch a summary of the key findings

In December 2024, the prime minister Keir Starmer tasked his new cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, with “nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British state”.

Whitehall Monitor 2026, the IfG’s annual data-led assessment of the size, shape and performance of the civil service, examines how the workforce changed in 2025. Reforming the state will never be the work of a single year; this edition of Whitehall Monitor assesses the progress the government has made so far, and concludes that meaningful change in the workforce is yet to happen.

We find that while there is a patchwork of small and welcome initiatives that draw on the concept of mission-led government – from ‘Test, Learn and Grow’ to AI pilots – these fragmented, narrow approaches have failed to coalesce into a coherent, established programme of reform. Instead, longstanding and problematic workforce trends continued in 2025. Nor did we find evidence of clear plans to address the underlying drivers of those trends.

Labour entered office a year and a half ago with a mission to change government. It would be hard to say the civil service at the close of 2025 is meaningfully different – let alone ‘rewired’ – when compared to the one Labour ministers were introduced to in the summer of 2024. There is much to do in the year ahead.