Burnham is wrong. Devolution will only grow Whitehall
Despite promises to streamline, the Civil Service has only grown and grown. Burnham’s devolution will make it worse, says Arthur Reynolds
Labour’s economic vandalism has forced the private sector to cut jobs for 22 months straight. But in a surprise to no one, Britain’s mandarins have kept expanding their fiefdoms.
Statistics slipped out during the height of summer show Civil Service headcount increased by more than 8,000 over the last financial year.
At the 2025 Spring Statement, Rachel Reeves promised voluntary-exit schemes would “reduce the size of the Civil Service”. Since then, more than 40,000 new recruits have joined, far dwarfing the 2,690 who have been made redundant voluntarily.
Voluntary exits cost taxpayers around £56,000 each and officials who take them are free to return to government six months later without sacrificing a penny in compensation. We’re funding bureaucrats’ extended holidays while we pay their successors’ wages – a scheme only Whitehall would have the collective stupidity to think up.
The Starmer-era target to cut departmental administrative budgets by 16 per cent by 2029-30 appears to be a pipe dream. The Institute for Government estimates it could require 40,000 job cuts. Under current redundancy schemes, the government expects to make fewer than 9,000 – thin gruel for those of us who’d like to see a more productive state.
Devolution will further inflate our Civil Service
Burnham has already fallen into the same trap as his predecessors. Although his argument that devolution will make the Civil Service smaller is theoretically sound, it has no basis in history.
Power has flowed towards Edinburgh, Cardiff and the regions for more than a generation, while officialdom has grown larger still.
In a speech early last month, Darren Jones made a similar observation and warned Burnham that “devolution must mean devolution, not duplication”. Hackneyed though his language might have been, Jones was not wrong.
Since the coalition launched its great wave of English devolution in 2014, handing new powers to Manchester and a succession of city regions, Civil Service headcount has increased by almost 120,000.
Rather than making itself redundant, Whitehall’s response to devolving power is to metamorphose into a regulatory state.
It sets objectives, calculates grants and steps in when local leaders fail. Crucially, Whitehall keeps control of funding and hoards political risk – a state of affairs Burnham was more than happy to capitalise on as Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Burgeoning bureaucracy
He may tinker around their edges, but the mayoral settlements Burnham inherits create a vast new bureaucracy. They will be overseen by programme boards comprising officials from MHCLG, the Treasury and any department that puts up money.
Mayors’ greater freedoms will exist within “outcomes frameworks” agreed with the centre and policed by a plethora of new accounting officers, reporting requirements and spending controls. Whitehall will be in dreamland – nothing delights a bureaucrat more than telling others how to do their jobs while achieving nothing themselves.
There’s a very real possibility Burnham will end up creating more politicians and more officials. Even the National Audit Office has cautioned that pre-existing plans could require greater capacity in Whitehall and regional government.
Existing civil servants are also becoming harder to shift, with turnover falling to its lowest level outside the pandemic in more than a decade. They will need to be dragged off the gravy train kicking and screaming.
Although with a snap election in play, I cannot imagine Burnham doing a single thing that risks alienating public sector workers. Bureaucrats and benefits claimants are the only sections of the electorate that reliably turn out for his party.
The Prime Minister has promised us a “new economic model”, but his Manchesterism risks turning Britain into a public sector with an economy attached.