The civil service added 136,000 staff in nine years. Every major service got worse.
Data to April 2026 · Updated 4 April 2026
In June 2016 the civil service employed 384,250 full-time equivalent staff, the lowest figure since the Second World War. By December 2025 it employed 520,860, a rise of 35.6 per cent. Some of that growth was expected: Brexit demanded new customs infrastructure, Covid required emergency capacity, and departments had been cut hard during austerity. What was not expected was that almost none of it would go to the front line.
Policy staff rose 116 per cent over the same period. Digital and data staff rose 152 per cent. These are desk jobs in London and the regional hubs. Operational delivery, the grades who actually process benefits, answer phones and staff prisons, grew 31 per cent. The growth happened overwhelmingly in the middle: Grade 6 and Grade 7 posts, the backbone of policy analysis, have expanded 132 per cent since 2010. Administrative and assistant grades, the people who do the filing, fell 47 per cent over the same period. More than 105,000 of those posts were cut.
The Senior Civil Service grew 52 per cent, reaching 7,525 officials by March 2025. The shape of the workforce flipped. There are now more managers per front-line worker than at any point in the modern civil service, yet the IfG's Performance Tracker concluded in 2025 that every major public service it measures remained worse than before the pandemic.
A charitable reading of these numbers would note that modern government needs more analysts and fewer filing clerks, which is true. A less charitable reading would ask why, after the largest proportional increase in policy staff in living memory, every department's delivery metrics got worse. The IfG asked the same question and concluded that much of the growth went to servicing internal processes: writing submissions, attending meetings, producing strategies that other strategy teams then reviewed.
Permanent secretaries earn between £155,000 and £220,000, set by the Senior Salaries Review Body. The ARIA chief executive, an outlier, earns between £380,000 and £385,000. The median Senior Civil Service salary is £92,540. Some 2,915 civil servants earn above £100,000; 35 earn above £200,000. The number earning above £150,000 rose 44.2 per cent in a single year, according to Civil Service Statistics 2025.
These are not unusual figures by private-sector standards. A FTSE 250 chief executive would earn substantially more. The question has never been whether senior civil servants are paid too much in absolute terms; it is whether the system ties pay to any observable outcome. The SSRB's own evidence sessions make clear that it does not. Bonuses are paid on internal assessments unconnected to departmental performance. A permanent secretary can preside over worsening metrics for years and leave on full pension with no financial consequence.
HMRC collects £800 billion a year. The DWP pays 20 million people on time. The civil service is not incompetent across the board. But its incentive structures ensure that competence is unrewarded and failure is painless.
These individuals did not personally cause every failure listed. Several inherited backlogs created by policy decisions above their grade. The point is that the system allowed each problem to worsen on their watch without any mechanism to hold the accounting officer accountable. Permanent secretaries who presided over large-scale failure left with the same pension and honours as those who didn't.
The employer pension contribution rate for the civil service is 28.97 per cent of pensionable pay, as confirmed by the Civil Superannuation Account 2024-25. The ONS median for private-sector employer contributions is 5 to 6 per cent. That is a ratio of roughly five to one, paid from general taxation, and it does not appear in the headline pay figures that departments publish.
The total unfunded liability of the civil service pension scheme is £197 billion. Unfunded means there is no investment pot generating returns; every penny comes from future tax revenue. To put £197 billion in context: total annual government spending on education is around £110 billion.
*TPA "Mandarin Millionaires" 2025. Mean of 20 most senior officials. Capitalised value, not a cash pot. Private sector pension data: ONS ASHE 2024, median employer contribution.
The TPA's "Mandarin Millionaires" report estimates that 14 of the 22 most senior civil servants have accrued pension entitlements worth more than £1 million each. Matthew Rycroft's is valued at £2.51 million, the highest. Jim Harra's annual pension was estimated by the Telegraph at roughly £107,000, with a lump sum of £278,000; these are journalist calculations based on scheme rules, not official HMRC disclosure, but the methodology is straightforward and the figures are plausible given his 41 years of service.
There is nothing inherently wrong with defined-benefit pensions. The problem is that they were abolished for most private-sector workers in the 2000s on the grounds that they were too expensive, while the public sector retained them. The cost was simply moved from the balance sheet to the future. That future is now arriving, and the £197 billion liability sits alongside local government pension deficits and the NHS scheme in a total unfunded public-sector pension obligation north of £2 trillion.
The ONS measures public service productivity by dividing total output (volume of services delivered) by total input (staff, goods, capital). In 2024, total public service productivity remained 3.4 per cent below where it was in 2019. Healthcare was 7.9 per cent below. These are revised figures; earlier estimates were worse, at 4.6 per cent and 9.6 per cent respectively, before methodology changes recommended by the National Statistician's Review brought them down. Even the revised numbers represent a remarkable outcome: five years on from the pandemic, with 136,000 additional staff, services have not returned to their pre-Covid level of efficiency.
Sick days are part of the picture but not the whole of it. Civil servants average 8.2 days of sickness absence per year against 4.4 in the private sector, a ratio of nearly two to one. The composition of the workforce matters here: the civil service employs more people in health-adjacent and prison-based roles than a typical employer, and junior grades (AA/AO) take 11.5 days on average while Senior Civil Service members take 2.7. A straight public-private comparison overstates the gap somewhat, but even controlling for sector composition, the difference is substantial. The Senior Civil Service figures suggest the incentive to show up increases with seniority, which is not surprising, but the four-fold gap between top and bottom grades is unusual.
Civil Service Sickness Absence 2025; ONS / TPA for private sector comparison.
The government spent £3.4 billion on management consultancy in 2023-24. Since December 2019, the eight largest consultancy firms have received a combined £8.56 billion in public contracts. The NAO has repeatedly noted that the government "lacks a clear picture" of its own consultancy spending, which is scattered across departmental budgets with no central tracking. Each time a capability gap opens in the civil service, the response is to hire consultants at day rates that dwarf the salaries of the civil servants sitting next to them, which demoralises the civil servants, who leave, which creates more capability gaps.
The combined cost of these five projects exceeds £70 billion. Every one was managed within the existing Whitehall framework: the Infrastructure and Projects Authority gave warnings, the PAC published reports, the NAO flagged risks. The machinery of accountability functioned; nothing happened as a result. Nobody was fired. Several of the senior responsible officers were promoted. The pattern is decades old: a 2010 NAO study found that over 90 reorganisations between 2005 and 2009 cost roughly £200 million a year, and "could not demonstrate they had achieved value for money." Fifteen years later, the government's own watchdog is still writing the same sentence.
Between 2017 and 2022, 604 people left government for private-sector roles that were reviewed by ACOBA, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. Transparency International found that 29 per cent of those roles overlapped with the individual's former policy area. In defence, the overlap was 81 per cent. ACOBA had four staff and a budget of £302,000. Its enforcement mechanism was to publish a letter of advice. In October 2025, the government abolished it.
A few individual cases show how the system works in practice. Tom Scholar, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, took chairmanships at Nomura International and Santander UK. Rupert McNeil, the former government chief people officer, breached the lobbying ban and was publicly censured by ACOBA, a body that had no power to impose any consequence beyond the censure itself. The abolition of ACOBA was presented as a reform. Whether its replacement, the Ethics and Integrity Commission, will have any more teeth remains to be seen. The Commission's terms of reference had not been published at the time of writing.
Every reorganisation of government departments costs at least £15 million, according to the IfG. The FCDO merger alone cost £24.7 million. MHCLG has been renamed four times since 2010. Between 2005 and 2009, the NAO counted over 90 restructures at a cost of roughly £200 million a year. Each one was meant to improve coordination. The NAO's verdict: "cannot demonstrate value for money."
136,000 more staff. £8.56 billion in consultancy. £197 billion in unfunded pensions. Productivity still below 2019. The NAO has written "cannot demonstrate value for money" in some form every year since 2010. Nobody disputes it. Nothing changes.