Civil servants' wage bill soars as staff numbers rocket

A surge in civil servant staff numbers has triggered calls for entire Whitehall departments to be axed and for a major reduction in Government staffing.

The Civil Service headcount has rocketed from 416,000 in 2016 to 546,000 this year.

During this time the estimated salary costs for all civil service departments and organisations has gone up from £11.6billion to £19.7billion.

Numbers on the books at the Home Office leapt from 28,060 to 52,075, and staffing increased from 82,230 to 91,160 at the Department for Work and Pensions. The headcount at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs went up from 1,700 to 7,140.

At the Department for Education it shot up from 2,260 to 7,235.

There was also a big increase at the Ministry of Justice, from 2,930 to 7,825, and the Cabinet Office, from 2,290 to 6,660. At the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the number of civil servants nearly doubled, going up from 530 to 1,010.

Conservative MP Peter Bedford called for major reductions in civil servant numbers. He said that to “improve productivity throughout the civil service, we need to cut 100,000 jobs from it and get Government departments doing the jobs that they have been set up to do”.

He said: “It is clear to anybody in the private sector – this Labour Government is not on your side.”

Professor Len Shackleton of the Institute of Economic Affairs, claimed that “productivity and performance has clearly fallen in many areas” despite the escalation in staff numbers.

Calling for a “strategic re-engineering of the public sector,” he recommended that Government departments including Culture, Media and Sport are scrapped.

John O’Connell, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers will be asking what on earth all these additional bureaucrats are actually doing. For years the surge in the number of civil servants has papered over the cracks created by sluggish public sector productivity, yet with services on their knees it’s clear the system is at breaking point.

“Ministers need to recognise that until there is a significant boost in output, simply boosting the number of pen pushers won’t deliver the improvements they hope.”

A government spokesman said: “We’re cutting down on expensive consultants by allowing departments to meet their resourcing needs more efficiently within their budgets.

"This is expected to save £1.2billion by 2026 while allowing departments to invest in their own workforce – delivering far better value for the taxpayer.”