Re:View 26 September 2025
We’re deep into the encore to Silly Season — party conferences — and the PM is attempting to reset his reset with a pre-conference speech today (just days before his conference speech, which is… unusual). Apropros of nothing, you may have heard that Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is only doing 3 events at Labour conference, one of those is our live ‘Meetings with Mayors’ (you can see our full schedule here).
Among the leadership speculation, the latest MRP poll, digital IDs and Ed Davey being “Trumpian” there’s been little space for policy. There have been, however, two things related to Whitehall workforce worth a mention.
On Thursday, the NAO published their guide to ‘Government exits and redundancies’. They expect at least 8,500 people to leave under exit schemes up to 2027, at an average cost of £63,000. As our Whitehall lead Joe Hill wrote, “so they're overpaying”. This is not surprising when the vast majority of people are leaving via ‘voluntary exits’, which comes with the most generous package (see the graph below).
This sort of mutually agreed departure may represent value for money when you’re dealing with poor performers — the civil service is terrible at dealing with this group, and so the most effective way of immediately gripping the problem may be to reach settlements with people (in lieu of actually having executed proper performance management). The cost of retaining poor performers is high: directly in the cost of their remuneration and in productivity losses and indirectly in the deep frustration it creates for high performers.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here, the bulk are people asking to leave and their managers agreeing. And as we’ve routinely argued here at Re:State, that comes with huge risks as well as sky-high costs. The NAO themselves argue that a key challenge is “how to stop high performers leaving”. The people who are confident of finding good alternative employment, and, let’s face it, can probably move to a higher salary in another sector, are being incentivised by a large cash pay out to leave at the very time we desperately need them to stay.
Voluntary schemes are by definition poorly targeted. If the PM is serious about rewiring the State then he needs to make the civil service take on the “poor performer merry-go-round” and he needs to flip the dark blue and the maroon portions in the graph.
The second workforce story is about pay. The number of officials earning 6-figure salaries has nearly doubled in the last 3 years, to a total of just over 3,500 people. For a sense of proportion that’s well under 1% of more than 500,000 civil servants. Cue the outrage. I have no idea if the specific people earning £100,000 plus are worth that money, but I do know that if they are high performers in their senior roles, they most likely could earn significantly more outside the civil service — and we have big recruitment and retention problems.
I also know that the State has never been in more desperate need of the best, brightest and most skilled people. And that since 2010, senior civil service pay has been eroded almost 25% in real terms, and pay is one of the issues that is driving issues in recruitment.
These two stories, which will go largely under the radar (in the case of the former, entirely ignored), are far more important to Britain’s future than any will/he won’t leadership intrigue.