November 12, 2015
Whitehall Rules! Improving pay and performance in the Civil Service
The Government could save £1 billion over the next four years by cutting the amount it currently spends on contractors by just 25%.
Whitehall Rules! finds that after a period of restraint, the amount of money Government departments spend on external contractors has risen significantly, nearing pre-2010 levels. In 2014/15, Government departments spent £1.01 billion, up from £610 million in 2011/12. In 2009/10, the amount spent on off-payroll staff was at least £1.5 billion.
The paper says that in 2014/15 there were on average 18,380 contractors – consultants, agency staff and interim managers – hired across Whitehall. The departments that used the most external support were:
- The Ministry of Justice hired 4,537 off-payroll staff
- The Department for Energy and Climate Change hired 3,377 off payroll staff
- The Home Office hired 2,493 off payroll staff
The report suggests that devolving payroll responsibility to departments at the forthcoming Spending Review will help them to plug long-term gaps in expertise and save money by reducing waste and duplication in off payroll expenditure.
It makes a number of other recommendations about how the Government’s HR budget can deliver better value for money for taxpayers while ensuring that Whitehall departments can recruit the best talent and get rid of surplus staff:
- Continue to reform redundancy pay and make it easier to separate out employees who have jobs that are no longer needed or not performing to the required standard.
- Reallocate spending on training to recruitment: it is easier to hire exceptional people than train people to be exceptional.
- Restructure Whitehall departments by creating flexible pools of talent that can respond to business needs.
- Reallocate funding for the Fast Stream away from Generalist positions and towards the specialist streams like Commercial, Finance and Digital.
A full table of the average number of staff (payroll and off payroll) and their total cost broken down by Whitehall department during 2014/15.
| Department | Headcount Full Time | Total Cost | |
| Payroll | Off-payroll | Off-payroll | |
| Cabinet Office | 3,671 | 347 | £51,234,793 |
| Business, Innovation & Skills | 25,792 | 1,582 | £129,140,667 |
| Culture, Media & Sport | 513 | 85 | £7,450,179 |
| Communities and Local Government | 4,822 | 333 | £8,617,772 |
| Environment, Food & Rural Affairs | 14,269 | 697 | £56,789,227 |
| Education | 4,820 | 333 | £18,949,333 |
| International Development | 1,924 | 45 | £3,107,588 |
| Transport | 16,855 | 617 | £70,471,029 |
| Work and Pensions | 84,579 | 239 | £57,800,904 |
| Health | 29,369 | 1,468 | £148,647,433 |
| Foreign & Commonwealth Office | 6,830 | 573 | £40,029,394 |
| Energy & Climate Change* | 1,544 | 3,377 | £4,655,633 |
| HM Treasury | 1,253 | 36 | £15,198,848 |
| Home Office | 28,503 | 2,493 | £85,000,909 |
| HMRC | 61,941 | 17 | £6,211,912 |
| Defence | 54,095 | 1,601 | £228,570,641 |
| Justice | 75,439 | 4,537 | £141,824,300 |
| Total | 418,052 | 18,380 | £1,073,700,564 |
*only first 4 months of payroll data is available
Testimonials
“This report provides an insightful path forward setting out how we can recruit, retain and nurture talent within our organisation. We may have the best civil service in the world but we always want to improve, and any innovative ideas which help us develop the best people to deliver better government services will always be welcome.” – Matthew Hancock MP, Minister for the Cabinet Officer and Paymaster General
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