Re:View 4 July 2025
Senior Researcher
Quote of the week
“He [Sir Ian Diamond] was a sort of hybrid of a Medici prince and Blofeld, and seemed unwilling or uninterested in anything anybody had to say. He managed to pull wool over the eyes of Ministers and the board, saying that everything was hunky-dory and innovation was going to be the great salvation to all our prayers...” .
Simon Hoare MP at a PACAC hearing on efficacy of ONS leadership.
As someone who spent their Whitehall career supporting transformation, efficiency, and reform, it feels odd to say this: the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s planned reduction of ~400 employees probably does not matter.
I don’t say this glibly. I’ve been in the shoes of the civil servants now facing uncertainty. Their worry is real, the disruption to MHCLG as an organisation will be real. But the need for MHCLG to be seen to ‘do its bit’ is not. It would be better to focus efforts on those parts of the system where there are efficiency opportunities that can be realised at scale — think large operational functions.
ONS data from 2024 puts the Civil Service full time equivalent employees (FTE) at around 540,000. The true size is likely significantly larger when you factor in contingent labour, consultants providing surge capacity, and the headcount hidden within outsourced managed services (many of which departments are now seeking to “insource”). Across this backdrop, MHCLG’s 400-person reduction is a rounding error and will have almost no bearing on the Civil Service’s admin budget savings target.
In an environment defined by limited bandwidth, constant crises, and an underpowered Whitehall reform function, the public interest is not served by applying cookie cutter targets to each department and treating them all equally. Yet, by the looks of the recent Departmental Efficiency Profiles released as part of the Spending Review, this is exactly the approach taken by the Office for Value for Money (and wider centre).
To put the 400 FTE reduction in perspective: as of 2024, HMRC alone (excluding the Valuation Office Agency, its only ALB) employed roughly 66,000 FTE. In contrast, the combined total across the CO, DBT, DCMS, DEFRA, DESNZ, DHSC, DSIT, DfE, DfT, FCDO and MHCLG (then DLUHC) sat at approximately 62,000 FTE — excluding their public bodies. Not all departments are equal, and neither is the value of their efficiency.
Workforce reform is and will continue to be a formidable task, especially as political attention drifts to other priorities. Efforts to drive, scrutinise, and assure efficiency across all Whitehall departments, regardless of the differences between them, could render the enterprise pointless, whilst generating serious disruption.
But there is a route for the likes of the Office for Value for Money to drive the efficiencies they’re accountable for. First, they need to be ruthless in deploying their attention and scrutiny. De-layering a corporate function might read better than shifting citizens to a chat bot rather than a call centre — but only the latter delivers the kinds of headcount reductions that departments have promised and the balance books demand. Second, and more importantly, they need to provide a route for funding for those departments undergoing workforce reduction exercises. Efficiency doesn’t come cheap — chat bots cost money, and so do voluntary exits.
Read of the week
For our read this week, I cannot recommend anything more highly than our own 'Re:Imagining Health' team's rapid analysis of the 10 Year Health Plan.
(Re:)Meet the team!
Each week, we will be reintroducing our readers to a member of our small but mighty Re:State team. This week the spotlight is on...
Dr Simon Kaye, Policy Director - @stkaye, @stkaye.bsky.social
Tell us something about yourself that we might not know?
I'm a serious David Bowie fan. If you want a very (very) long conversation about whether Neuköln should actually have been the closer on the "Heroes" album or if there are too many cover versions in Heathen, I'm your man.
What are you working on?
Right now, we're still exploring a vision for the future of what actual regionalism in England should look like — we're going to be looking at how pan-regional structures and London ought to work next. I'm also working on a paper on the adult social care system.
Who is your favourite reformer?
Eleanor Rathbone — feminist MP, social campaigner, opponent of the Boer War and of appeasement, public administration expert, inventor of the family allowance, and one of the architects of women’s suffrage!
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
My kids, usually...