Starmer promised to ‘rewire the state’ so why is the civil service bigger?
Civil service headcount has reached a 20-year high, bigger than it was during Brexit or Covid. Yet more proof that this Prime Minister’s only belief is in bigger government, says Eliot Wilson
When Sir Keir Starmer appointed a new cabinet secretary and head of the civil service at the end of 2024, he made a notably cautious choice. He picked Sir Chris Wormald, an Oxford-educated mandarin who had been a permanent secretary for 12 years and had never worked outside Whitehall, but praised his “wealth of experience… at a critical moment in the work of change this new government has begun”. He went on to promise “nothing less than the complete re-wiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform”.
It has not quite worked out like that. In the year to September 2025, civil service numbers grew by 4,000 to reach 520,440 full-time equivalent posts, the highest level in 20 years. The expansion is not evenly distributed: since 2010, middle management grades have grown by 132 per cent, while the senior civil service (deputy director/Grade 5 and above) has expanded by 52 per cent.
Consider that. The civil service is now larger than it was during Brexit or the Covid-19 pandemic. Reductions by the coalition and then the Conservative government had reduced the total to 384,000 just before the Brexit referendum, more than a quarter smaller than today.
There has been a simultaneous and contradictory diminution of authority as executive power and influence over policy have dissipated centrifugally to arms-length bodies, regulators, non-governmental organisations and campaign groups. Paul Ovenden, previously Starmer’s director of political strategy who was forced to resign last September, has returned to the fray to highlight this problem.
Writing last week in The Times, Ovenden described “a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself”. He painted a picture of a “Stakeholder State… given voice by political podcasts where everyone violently agrees… canonised through a corrupted honours system”. This followed the Prime Minister’s appearance before the House of Commons liaison committee in December, where he agreed (violently?) that the situation was unsatisfactory.
“My experience as Prime Minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be.”
He added that he wanted to “move more quickly but that was never possible on day one in government”.
It’s not day one
It is not “day one”. It is not even “day 501”. Labour has been in office for 18 months and has promised improved performance management, and more rapid removal of poor performers, a “transformation fund” to increase the use of digital technology and AI and a relaunched voluntary exit scheme. It has pledged to reduce the administration costs of the civil service by 15 per cent and save £2.2bn on “back-office functions” by 2030. That target, it is worth remembering, is beyond the next general election. Currently the government is clearly going in the wrong direction.
Civil service reform is hard but not impossible, as David Cameron and his Whitehall Luca Brasi, Francis Maude, showed between 2010 and 2016. But Starmer is struggling for a number of reasons. He finds it almost incautiously easy to promise sweeping change – ”the complete rewiring of the British state” – but does not always face up to the practical implications, or struggles to distinguish between saying something and doing it.
Starmer also has a tendency to shirk responsibility. He gave the liaison committee a perfect demonstration of his “Believe me, I’m as frustrated as you are” attempt to reassure, but he is the Prime Minister and has the power to act. Unlike his four-year stint as leader of the opposition, it is no longer enough simply to sympathise with the frustrated and impatient.
I doubt his basic commitment to making Whitehall smaller. In his first speech as Prime Minister on 5 July 2024, he promised voters he would “tread more lightly on your lives”, but it rang false even then. More revealing were his comments on institutional reform in March 2025: “I believe in the power of government, I’ve always believed in the power of government… what I call active government, on the pitch doing what was needed… I believe that working people want active government – they don’t want a weak state.”
Starmer has taught himself to denounce a “bigger state, or an intrusive state, an ever-expanding state”, but, as a former senior civil servant, he believes that it is government which drives change, growth and prosperity. The private sector and civil society merely follow its lead.
A leader who wants to “rewire” the state and make it smaller has to have a clear vision of the outcome he wants, an almost obsessive determination to achieve it and an acceptance that it will require unpopular decisions, especially for a Labour Prime Minister so wedded to the public sector. Starmer will be judged on results, not aspirations, and so far the picture is stark: the biggest bureaucracy in two decades and a forecast of the biggest public expenditure in history in cash terms, absorbing more GDP than any time since the Second World War excepting a spike during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s not working. Is Sir Keir Starmer really willing to do what it takes to rewire the state? At the moment the answer seems to be no.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian; senior fellow for national security at Coalition for Global Prosperity; contributing editor, Defence on the Brink