The Telegraph has a small story on its front page today about the fact that there are 700 people working in the Cabinet Office’s HR department. Each department also has its own HR function.
The striking comment for me was that this was a concern in terms of slowing down the civil service headcount reduction that Steve Barclay (chief of staff) has been tasked with reviewing.
The full article is behind a paywall, so there’s probably more detail that I’m missing - but I found it interesting that this large HR department is seen as a blocker to organisational development and change. www.telegraph.co.uk/.../
A quick Google suggests that there are around 475,000 full time civil servants. In smaller organizations I've often advised that a sensible rule of thumb is about one HR staff member per 100 employees. That would imply a total population of HR staff of 4,750. Even allowing for economies of scale and the fact that there are embedded HR teams with many regional and specialist civil service groups, a Cabinet Office team of 700 HR staff responsible for the home of the UK Home Civil Service doesn't seem entirely unreasonable in that context.
Of course any organisation needs to look hard at its cost structure.
And any politician needs to look hard at getting the next headline.
The advantage for observers when looking at the Civil Service is that they do publish wonderfully helpful statistics.
From the link below you can see that there are 7,860 Civil Servants in the HR profession making up 2.2% of the workforce. There are more civil servants working in security :-) (Page 18)
As you dig into the data more there are 9,580 people working in the HR function (including the professionals listed above) which takes the ratio up and makes up around 3% of the workforce
Is this number high? Well compared to the private sector probably as usually numbers quoted are around 1:80-1:150 rather than the 1:50 or 1:35 here. But the Civil Service have always managed people differently and taken a lead in certain areas driving core HR numbers up
Agreed that it’s a nice little headline grabber, with minimal useful context. Always good to challenge these things with some actual reference to the wider picture!
I have a number of friends and ex colleagues who work in Government or Cabinet office and according to them, they have huge numbers of HR folk quitting, so no doubt they will soon be moaning that they can't implement the necessary reductions in staffing due to a shortage of HR staff
The same (or similar) article I saw in The Times also mentioned that the HR Department was one of the few that had reduced their numbers recently so TBH I thought it was a non-story with a headline grabber.
I'm an ex Civil Servant. A long time ago I worked with our HR Director and managed to convince HMT (Treasury) in an efficiency review meeting that we could save money by having more HR professionals in our department (for a variety of reasons, largely about increasing overall productivity). It didn't translate into any action to give us more HR staff unfortunately. But the evidence was solid.
At least in the civil service department that I worked in it was pretty well recognised that we had more work than people to do it - that didn't stop us being tasked to find jobs to cut though...
