The civil service requires serious reform, and rearranging the deck chairs — including sending some to Manchester — will not suffice, writes Jonathan Eida.

Politicians are finally acknowledging what taxpayers have known for years: the civil service is too big, too expensive and too slow.

With the next general election approaching, the Conservatives, Reform and even Labour are now discussing how to address the problem. Reform has Danny Kruger working on civil service reform, the Tories have called for returning the civil service to its 2016 headcount level, and the Labour government has pushed for greater civil service productivity in order to cut costs in its spending review.

This cross-party attention follows years in which the civil service grew back to — and beyond — the levels it had reached before the austerity-era cuts that followed 2010, when headcount fell by roughly a fifth under the coalition government. The growth since 2016 has reversed much of that reduction, making headcount once again a central political battleground.

With total public service productivity rising by only 0.9 per cent in 2025, the consensus appears to be that the public sector, including the civil service, is not working. That weak figure sits against a longer-running backdrop: UK public sector productivity has still not fully recovered to its pre-2008 financial crisis level, a gap successive governments have struggled to close. Yet things seem only to be getting worse. The size of the state continues to grow year on year, with few signs of relenting or of matching productivity gains.

How big is the civil service in 2026?

This expansion is clearly visible in the civil service itself. According to new research by the TaxPayers' Alliance, between 2016 and 2026 civil service headcount rose by almost 140,000, from 418,340 to 557,825 — an increase of 33.3 per cent. Since 2025 alone, the number of civil servants has grown by 8,165.

The total cost of civil service salaries in 2026 is estimated at over £22.5bn, a 95 per cent increase since 2016. Cash, in other words, is being poured in without the corresponding productivity output.

Nor is it only headcount that is climbing: staff are also moving up the organisational ladder at a disproportionate rate. Growth in the civil service between 2025 and 2026 was concentrated in the higher grades. Employees in the top three grades increased by 7,600, or three per cent, while the most junior grade fell.

This appears to be partly a consequence of grade inflation, in which staff are offered promotions as a make-weight for overall pay restraint — a dynamic that has long been flagged in civil service pay negotiations, where constrained headline pay rises have coexisted with progression through internal pay bands. Crucially, these promotions are not always tied to performance; rather, senior roles are handed out as a reward for staying in the job. The result is overpromoted personnel occupying top posts, slowing the state's productive capacity.

Burnham's devolution is unlikely to help

The issue seems likely to worsen under Burnham. The Prime Minister appears focused on shifting around the deck chairs — moving some to Manchester in the process — but this does not resolve the core problems.

Relocation of Whitehall roles is not a new idea: the previous government's "Places for Growth" programme, launched in 2020, committed to moving tens of thousands of civil service posts out of London, including the creation of cabinet committee-style presences and campuses such as the Treasury's second headquarters in Darlington. That experience frames the current debate over whether geography, rather than structure and accountability, is the binding constraint on performance.

In fact, the North West of England, where Manchester is situated, already has the second-highest civil service headcount in 2026. In the decade to 2016, the North West recorded the largest increase in its share of the civil service workforce, rising from 12.4 per cent to 13.5 per cent. If relocating Whitehall functions across the country were truly the solution, productivity gains would already have materialised as the civil service spread out.

Fundamentally, major changes are required to fix the civil service's weak productivity. Performance and underperformance must be treated accordingly, and failure to perform should not be rewarded, as currently appears to be the case.

More importantly, the role of the state must be reduced. The state is bloated as it is, and no amount of "Manchesterism" gimmicks will resolve that. However, if this is the direction Burnham takes, the government should — to curb further growth — adopt a 'one-up, two-down' rule, under which every new civil service role created in the North of England is matched by the abolition of two senior posts in London. This would ensure that No 10 North does not simply become a vehicle for creating more 'non-jobs', while also trimming the layers of middle management in Whitehall.

The answer is not more bureaucracy sprawled across the country, but a smaller state that genuinely works.

Jonathan Eida is public affairs manager at the TaxPayers' Alliance.