Unpacking the Slop Right's civil service delusions

As of late 2024/early 2025, the UK Civil Service employs approximately 543,000 to 548,000 people (headcount), representing a two-decade high and a 21% increase since 2019. Most reasonable people will say that’s too big. I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable to say that the 21% increase should be reversed.

The problem I have with the populist right is that they hold the idea that most of the civil service is useless, corrupt and woke and there are no real world consequences to going at it with an axe.

While there are egregious examples of Whitehall wokery and waste I don’t think this is representative of the entire institution. Just a cursory look at the landscape reframes this perception. When I looked at quangos, I found that most of them serve a function, and the top ten soak up 90% of the funding. You could have a “bonfire of quangos” and still not save more than £100m. Then, looking specifically at the civil service, about 70% of the headcount is in the top five departments.

The top five departments by headcount are the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Ministry of Justice (MoJ), HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), Ministry of Defence (MoD), and Home Office, collectively employing around 374,530 people.

As such, what you’re looking at is policy cost. It requires a deeper look to examine what is causing the bloat - and if it can even be fairly described as useless bloat.

A quick look at HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) shows there are rising backlogs with rising levels of complexity. Crown Court cases are 19% higher than pre-2020 levels, with open caseloads doubling to 78,329 by June 2025; ineffective trial rates rose to 23%. High rates of ineffective trials (23% as noted) often result from last-minute issues like missing witnesses, unprepared parties, or evidence delays. Tribunal cases, like asylum appeals, surged from 7,510 in March 2023 to 50,976 in March 2025. These demand more staff for case processing hearings.

As such, you don’t need yet another civil service reorganisation. You need a complete justice policy.

Then when you look at another of the big employers, the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), it employs a large workforce—around 90,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff as of late 2025, making it one of the largest (if not the largest, depending on metrics like headcount vs. FTE) civil service departments—primarily due to the immense scale and complexity of its operations.

The DWP serves approximately 20 million claimants and customers across the UK, administering a wide array of benefits, pensions, and support services. This includes the State Pension for retirees, working-age benefits like Universal Credit, disability and ill-health payments (e.g., Personal Independence Payment or PIP, Disability Living Allowance), Carer’s Allowance, and child maintenance.

Processing and paying out these benefits requires extensive administrative, operational, and customer-facing roles. For instance, handling claims involves verification, assessments (often in-person or via medical evaluations), payments, and appeals (tasks that are labour-intensive and cannot be fully automated due to their personalised nature).

Again, you don’t need yet another civil service reorganisation. You need a complete overhaul of welfare policy. If we treat the problem as a headcount problem rather than a policy problem we’re going to end up breaking the few things that work.

But this kind of reform is harder than it looks. Looking at the justice system, there’s still a sizable casework backlog from lockdowns, while the system was already overstretched thanks to the Tories dismantling hundreds of magistrates courts. We could reverse those cuts but then magistrates courts are not cost free in terms of estates and headcount.

The only quick win I can see is to close the asylum appeals system entirely. If you’ve arrived by dinghy, you are not a refugee. But that only gets you so far. This is what precipitates the drive to do away with horribly inefficient things like jury trials.

Headcounts in the DWP, meanwhile, can be reduced by streamlining the welfare system, but again this is harder than it looks. Virtually every administration since Blair has attempted welfare reform, only to find it fraught with complexity and political risk - where even marginal reform is glacial. We should also recall that Mrs May lost her majority by attempting to reform the adult social care system.

The popular assumption on the right (and within the higher echelons of the civil service) is that much of the back office work can be automated with AI, but AI is not mature enough to be able to handle edge cases, or replace front line disability assessors. Its inadequacies create as many problems as it solves and refining it is going to require a lot of expensive IT consultancy - which is not famed for value for money. AI can handle Amazon refunds where the economies of scale are tilted against quibbling over pennies, but in benefits payments, every penny must be accounted for.

You can, of course, eliminate edge case assessment by going for more universal systems, but this was the thinking behind Universal Credit, which ended up being modular and every bit as bureaucratic as what it replaced.

The point here is that it’s easy for the outsider to make sweeping statements about the size of the state but you can’t go in swinging the axe. You could send a memo out instructing every department to shed one in five employees overnight but that means sacking court clerks, prison officers, probation officers and tax inspectors. Good luck with that.

I’m not saying there isn’t fat to trim. It’s just that you’re going to have to climb in and do the detail work to find it. But you don’t see anyone on the slop right doing this kind of work. The Rupert Lowes of this world, inspired by “afuera”, believe that most governance is useless and obstructive, even to the point of declaring the state the “enemy of the people” - failing to recognise that our bureaucracy is what sets us apart from southern hemisphere basketcases.

In making sweeping claims about state inefficiency, the slop right are setting themselves up to fail. They will raise expectations, much like Reform did with their DOGE programme, only to be the ones putting up taxes again while making no meaningful reductions to overall headcount. Recent events such as the Glasgow Central fire reveal that there is next to zero enforcement of rules around small shops leading to the explosion in laundering fronts, which will necessarily require an expansion of frontline enforcement - which in turn will require back office support.

The lazy assumption on the right is that back office support is the main cause of bloat, which is usually the assumption of people who’ve never actually been involved in the day-to-day running of things, but experience shows that when frontline staff (such as doctors or police officers) are forced to take on additional administrative tasks previously handled by back office teams, it reduces the time they spend on their core duties.

You can’t simply abandon administration. Hospitals and the justice system would collapse without it. Meanwhile, cutting experienced administrative staff can lead to significant knowledge gaps, making it harder for an organisation to function effectively or implement new policies.

Of course, the one thing the slop right does not want to hear is that governing a first world country is necessary expensive and bureaucratic. Everyone wants a lean DEFRA until the first Foot and Mouth outbreak when biosecurity suddenly becomes important again. There is certainly a lot of useless governance around climate change in DEFRA, but again this is not a headcount issue. It’s a policy issue.

This is why policy work is so important. You first have to decide your priorities and what you want the state to do. Parties who campaign on law and justice issues should want a properly resourced justice system and a functioning prison system. We keep learning the hard way that this cannot be done on the cheap. Form follows function.

Without doing this kind of work, any government of the slop right will immediately be cautioned by the civil service to engage in more top-down reorganisations without understanding the policy landscape, where as usual, the right will complain about civil service obstruction. While the right complains about entrenched bureaucracy and vested interests, civil servants are often just fighting their corner to maintain a level of functionality in the face of ministerial demands that simply do not understand the nature of the organisation.

For these reasons, we should be cautious of ranty old men who believe there is a simple solution to complex problems. They are more likely to destroy what they don’t understand than bring remedy to anything. It all stems from the fact that most of what the populist right believes is either nostalgia or informed by lazy tabloid reporting. They don't attract the sort of people who take any kind of detailed interest in anything, so all their solutions are geared to what they think is happening rather than what is actually happening. They think everything is too broken to fix so their default position is just to nuke everything and start over. This isn't radicalism. It's nihilism.