Ditching dogma: Targeted reforms are needed for Britain's bureaucracy

I’m not normally a fan of The Taxpayer’s Alliance, but William Yarwood has produced an interesting X thread on the civil service. According to his research, the civil service is becoming smaller where the work is done (to be charitable for a moment) and larger in the managerial class. Fewer day-to-day junior staff, more managers. That shift alone reveals a great deal about how the system now operates.

If anything, this is the trend we need to address in the civil service, the NHS and academia. There's a lot of looting going on. Personally, I am not persuaded by the right's determination to slash the civil service without defining what it is they want it to actually do. The UK civil service headcount stood at approximately 554,000 as of September 2025. With the UK population standing at 69,790,483, that's roughly 1 civil servant per 126 people, and given the complex needs of a first world economy, that doesn't seem wildly unreasonable - unless you're one of those libertarian bores who doesn't think we need a department of culture or nuclear decommissioning body.

Rather than setting about an ideological headcount reduction, I would rather look at what functions can be devolved to the local level and fund it through local taxation. That said, the reactionary right might have something of a point. Serious questions do need to be asked. Why, for instance, does the department for education employ 8000 people? But how unreasonable is that when you consider that the UK has around 9 million kids and young people in state-funded schools alone?

What I want to see from the right is granular analysis rather than knee-jerk assumption. Just because you don't value an arm of government doesn't necessarily mean it is not needed, or there aren't externalities to abolishing it. Cuts for their own sake can be disastrous, Cameron closed hundreds of magistrates courts and as a result the justice system has all but collapsed.

The libertarian bore will say we managed the whole of India with only a handful of civil servants, but Indian administrators never applied themselves to building nuclear power stations, vehicle registration databases, flood prevention, defence procurement, fisheries management, animal disease surveillance, or meditating international trade disputes or investigating air accidents.

It should also be recalled that in leaving the EU we notionally resorted a great many regulatory functions to Whitehall, and good regulation necessarily requires a large pool of expertise. The whole reason we left the EU was to shorten the chain of accountability and devise our own regulatory systems.

The trope that the civil service is bloated and useless is older than me, and every government has meddled with it for the last hundred years, and still not found an optimal configuration. Nobody has ever beaten the laws of bureaucracy because bureaucracy is how humans organise their administrative affairs.

I am of the view that rather than cutting the civil service for its own sake, we need a review of the regulatory systems that necessitate officials. Certainly a run of deregulation could delete some unnecessary and obstructive arms of government, but a thorough regulatory review may also identify areas where we need more administrators and inspectors. Especially so if we want to get a grip on illegal immigration and organised crime. Both problems being symptomatic of policy neglect.

I still live by the maxim "that which governs best governs least" but I also recall that it is our rules and regulations that makes us a first world country with drinkable water from the taps and buildings that don't collapse. China is an example of what you get when you have unrestricted growth policies without regulation. They're polluting themselves into oblivion, their buildings are falling down, and all their new infrastructure won't even last sixty years. Good government requires effective administration and surveillance of concerns.

As such, I'm not interested in the Thatcherite fantasies on the right about slashing the civil service. I want to see grown-up, careful analysis and serious policy. It's interesting that yesterday, after all the wailing, Rupert Lowe could only identify 18 DEI posts in the Home Office. Sacking them saves a little under £1m. And that's assuming none of them serve a function. It's likely that some of them do.

This is the same assumption-fuelled shtick behind Reform's DOGE project which struggled to find the waste they assumed existed. They rightly intercepted some idiotic Net Zero spending but that's the low hanging fruit.

I'm generally on side when it comes to seeking out waste and making cuts where there's a slam dunk case, but what passes for research on the right is cursory, lazy and almost entirely based on their own tabloid-informed assumptions. I don't find it very compelling.