Oh, what joy to be a ‘civil servant’!

Friday-weekend blog

Let’s start with this chart:

Having fallen from around 400,000 civil servants at the start of 2009 to about 390,000 by 2016, the number of civil servants has shot up to 554,000 by December 2025 according to some reports. That’s a massive 42% increase.

Let’s assume that the average civil servant costs us say £50,000 a year including salary, office costs, national insurance payments, generous expenses and other benefits. Note that I haven’t included pension costs. As far as I understand, the only public sector pension scheme where there is real money is the Local Government pension scheme. All other public-sector pensions will be paid through taxation. So, in addition to that actual cost of 164,000 extra civil servants, we face paying tens of billions in the future so our civil servants can enjoy comfortable, guaranteed, inflation-protected golden years. For civil servants, their golden years will really be golden due to our generosity.

Anyway, just taking my proposed figure of £50,000 per extra civil servant, that means we are now paying about £8.2 billion per year more for 164,000 more civil servants than we did nine years ago.

Yet, in spite of the massive increase in the number of civil servants and their cost, nothing in Britain seems to work. Our education system, our health service, our military, our state administration, our immigration controls and our government all seem to be collapsing.

You’ll all have heard of “The Peter Principle”:

Hopefully, you’ll all also have heard of Parkinson’s Law:

Parkinson derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service. He gave, as examples, the growth in the size of the British Admiralty and Colonial Office even though the numbers of, respectively, their ships and colonies were declining. He expressed this as “The number of workers within public administration tends to grow regardless of the amount of work to be done”. And he suggested that any public sector organisation will increase by around 5% to 6% a year as managers build up their own local empires to justify ever-increasing budgets for their areas of responsibility.

Here’s a chart I produced for my 2009 book “Fleeced” based on Parkinson’s work studying the growth in bureaucrats at the Admiralty while the number of ships and sailors plumeted:

If we look at what happened in the British civil service in the nine years between 2016 and 2025, we see an increase in staffing of 42% – about 4.7% a year. That’s fairly close to Parkinson’s predicted 5% to 6% a year.

So why are ever more civil servants achieving ever less? The answer is, of course:

• The Peter Principle where tens of thousands of civil servants are being automatically promoted to their level of incompetence
• Parkinson’s Law which states that managers will always seek to expand their own little empires leading to growth of the organisation 5% to 6% a year regardless of the quantity of work (if any) to be done.

I suspect there is yet one more reason our public sector is so utterly useless – DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality or Equity or whatever). Instead of hiring the best candidates, our civil service is hiring useless, lazy, incompetent and often utterly corrupt people based on their skin colour, sexual identity, religion and ethnicity. Many of these DIE hires will originate from countries where pointless bureaucracy and widespread corruption are a way of life. After all, if the RAF is turning away the best candidates to be pilots because they are white, heterosexual males, I shudder to think of the ‘quality’ and morality of those being hired by the civil service.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves used her spring statement in March 2025 to announce that Civil Service running costs would be reduced by 15% by the end of the decade.

However, at the same time ministers have committed to increasing the proportion of civil servants working in digital and data roles, supposedly “creating a workforce fit for the future”. The project delivery and digital, data and technology (DDaT) professions in our civil service, for example, have expanded by 224% and 199% respectively since 2010. Dear Rachel, increases of 224% and 199% do not constitute a reduction in civil service running costs.

Since Starmer’s Labour came to power, the number civil servants has increased by more than 8,000. So, if you’re expecting civil service numbers and costs to fall like Rachel promised, don’t hold your breath. Here, as in every other action it takes, the Labour government is doing precisely the opposite of what it claims to be doing:

• Putting British interests first yet allowing a Third-World invasion of our country
• Protecting free speech yet imprisoning people for social media posts
• Prioritising economic growth yet raising taxes so much that they are driving Britain into recession
• Giving Britain energy security yet blocking all development of North Sea oil and gas fields
• Supporting working people yet putting up their taxes to pay for the uneducated and unemployable multi-cultural invaders and to increase benefits for the nine million or so who would rather stay at home watching Netflix or suchlike than go to work
• etc etc etc

Here’s a lady who has sussed out how ‘wonderful’ the Starmer government actually is: