Civil Service staff numbers under the Coalition government, 2010 to 2015
We look at the latest numbers.
The latest numbers from the Office for National Statistics show the number of civil servants as of March 2015. Emily Andrews and Gavin Freeguard look at how the size of the Civil Service changed under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.
There are now 406,140 civil servants, up from 405,400 in the previous quarter – a rise of 740.
"not enough planning has gone into making sure that, over the longer term, the reductions already made and any required in future are sustainable and do not damage the delivery of public services."
With further spending cuts announced, the IfG has said that further staff cuts are ‘inevitable’ and will need to be accompanied by reforms to how Whitehall goes about its business. Of course, there is significant variation in the number of civil servants employed by individual Whitehall departments. DWP and its associated organisations employ 81,310 civil servants; DCMS only employs 570.
- The department: The civil servants directly under the control of ministers and the permanent secretary, which sometimes includes other bodies (like the National Offender Management Service at MoJ, or Education Funding Agency at DfE)
- Other organisations: Other arm’s-length bodies which the department is responsible for – e.g. to parliament – but doesn’t manage as directly (such as the DVLA at DfT).
(The civil service numbers published by the ONS do not include every employee the department is in some way responsible for – there are separate releases for other arm’s-length bodies and the wider public sector.) Reductions in some of the arm’s-length bodies reporting to BIS – particularly Companies House and the Land Registry – have seen it fall below DfT to become the seventh-largest departmental group, with 12,140 civil servants in total. Other than this, the relative size of departments has remained unchanged since Q4 2014. Since the spending review in 2010, all but three departments have reduced their staff numbers, DCLG having reduced by the most…
- Topic
- Civil service Ministers
- Administration
- Cameron-Clegg coalition government
- Publisher
- Institute for Government