Civil service bloat is not being tackled

The number of civil servants in Scotland has increased rapidly in recent years, to the extent where even the Scottish Government was starting to voice concerns. It then announced an intention to cut government spending on bureaucracy substantially – yet over the period since it announced this intention, numbers have risen substantially again. What is going on?

Then numbers are stark. In six years since 2019 the total number of civil servants increased by about 8,000 which represents a very substantial 44 per cent increase on the total. In fact twice as man civil servants were added to the books in the last six years than over the preceding 18 years.

Since the Scottish Government promised to halt and reverse this trend, another 430 civil servants posts have been created. This is against a trend in the public sector over the same period where the number of staff outside the civil service is either declining a bit if you could total numbers or increasing a bit if you count hours worked. Frontline staff have definitely not seen a 44 per cent surge in numbers over that time.

It has taken far too long to get a rounded critique of total civil service numbers. Those on the right tend to be generally hostile to large public sectors and so have routinely criticised swelling numbers on a 'small government' basis. That has meant there has been a hesitancy on the left of the political spectrum to look at this issue.

That tendency has been exacerbated by the aggressive hard-right posturing of Elon Musk and Doge and the chainsaw-wielding Javier Milei in Argentine. The argument that government is fundamentally wasteful and should always be cut has become a rallying call for the right.

But more focus is required. The right's budget-cutting has used the excuse of excessive bureaucracy to target the service delivery itself for cuts. But extensive public services is in no sense fundamentally wasteful but quite the opposite – to see true profligacy one should look to the US privatised healthcare system.

However, that in turn does not mean that all aspects of public delivery are fit for purpose. A distinction needs to be made between frontline staff delivering skilled and semi-skilled roles directly to service users and backroom staff who are administering services. These have become two very distinct and separate classes in the Scottish public sector.

The management class operates through a system of management information. To manage the frontline they need constant, live and updated data which can be broken down to a granular level. A management information system doesn't manage the services, they manage the data the services produce. They do this via targets and procedural imposition of mandated behaviours based on data analysis.

Central services top-slice the value of frontline services to pay for all of this. In some instances that top-slicing procedure is particularly predatory; at its most benign it is an 'administration fee', but often it is now a full charging model where frontline services have to 'rent' buildings and internal services which are already in public ownership.

This is the internal market model where everything that is publicly owned is seen as if they were private assets owned by the management class which are then required to maximise returns on those assets through a cost accounting system which is imposed on frontline professionals.

And of course this management class also services politicians and is continually creating grant funds or other mechanisms which divide up funding allocated for services and gives the politician something to announce to make it look like they are addressing a subject – even though the funding was already allocated. And of course these funds need to be administered.

Some of this is ideological. Some of it is political cynicism. Some of it is avarice – these are large empires which are extremely well remunerated and capable of reproducing themselves at will. They control the budgets and if they want to expand themselves they barely need permission.

Yet every step above has one primary outcome – it drags frontline staff away from what they should be doing,. They have to stop serving citizens in order to serve managers by completing endless data returns. They have to bid for funding. They have complex internal accounting for the funding they do get. They are constantly being 'retrained' to meet latest short-term political objectives.

This is put forward as a means of achieving efficiency but it has done precisely the opposite. It has dragged resources away from public service towards the management class and public services are starved of cash as a result.

It is not that those in the Scottish Government who are addressing this are not sincere, it's that they are working against the practices of every other member of the government. While one department is trying to reduce bloat at the centre, five others are creating new targets or new grant funds or have created new data gathering requirements and have more than undone any efficiency pursued.

Only a frontline-first approach in which frontline professionals are trusted to manage their own services can tackle this behaviour. We are not making progress in that direction but are quite transparently moving in the other direction.