By Lucy Phillips
2 February 2010
The senior civil service depends too heavily on external recruits, who are paid more yet perform no better than career public servants, according to a report by MPs.
The public administration select committee said the civil service should reduce its reliance on costly outside appointments, particularly in light of tightening government budgets.
The MPs found that external recruits were paid on average 20% more than those promoted to senior roles from within the civil service but there was no evidence that they performed any better. They were also likely to leave quicker.
Outside recruitment was particularly high among the top 200 most senior civil servant posts, accounting for more than half of appointments every year since 2005.
Committee chair Tony Wright said: ‘We have a permanent civil service, but increasingly it is not made up entirely of permanent civil servants... We did not find evidence that outside recruits have drastically changed the nature and ethos of the senior civil service, but equally there is a lack of performance data to support the claim that they are good value for money.’
The MPs rejected calls for a cap on the overall number of external recruits but said the government should ‘redress the balance’ by developing internal skills and talent – which it had not been very good at until recently. There should also be greater monitoring of the pay and performance of external recruits and more appointments should be made from local government and wider public sector organisations, as opposed to the private sector.
The government has pledged to cut the senior civil service wage bill by £100m over the next three years – mainly through reducing bureaucracy and management layers.
