How to be a Civil Servant
Civil Servants are those who are employed by the Crown, excluding those employed by the Monarch herself. The Civil Service therefore excludes those who are employed by Parliament and those employed by other public bodies. The rest of this note examines those three types of public sector employee and ends with a summary of key statistics. See a separate note for civil service and related statistics.
The first category of public body is comprised of Parliament itself, and the bodies which report direct to Parliament, including the National Audit Office, the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Electoral Commission. Constitutionally, employees of these bodies are not servants of the Crown and they are therefore not civil servants.
The second category of public body is comprised essentially of those who work for Government departments which report to Ministers (who are of course always Parliamentarians). How to be a Civil Servant is written for and about those civil servants who work in such departments.
As civil servants are employed by the Crown, and not by individual departments, they can be transferred between departments without formality and without losing employment rights. This not only facilitates the free flow of staff between departments, but also greatly facilitates reorganisations within central government. Indeed it is quite common for large numbers of civil servants to find themselves working for an entirely different department at only a few hours notice.
(Many departments have turned parts of themselves into Executive Agencies. These bodies, such as the Benefits Agency and the Patent Office, constitutionally remain part of their parent department. However, they implement established policies and it makes sense for them to be run semi-independently from their head offices. Most MPs who wish to raise constituency matters with such Agencies are content to correspond directly with their Chief Executives, rather than through Ministerial intermediaries.)
Special Advisers are political appointees who are employed by government departments on special terms. They are, however, still civil servants. Click here for more information.
Civil Servants also work for a number of non-Ministerial Government Departments (NMGDs), which themselves include two main categories. The first contains the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise whose senior officials work closely with Ministers and whose key policies are set each year in the Finance Act. However, neither Ministers nor Parliament can interfere in day-to-day taxation decisions. The second category of NMGD contains "independent" bodies such as the Charity Commission, Ofsted and the economic regulators, such as the Office of Fair Trading, and the Postal Services Commission. These bodies are "creatures of statute":- that is they implement legislation which they have no power to change. Their political independence is assured by providing that they have the status of Government Departments, but are accountable only to Parliament and the Courts. Their budgets are usually set by the Treasury, not by the department which set them up, and they are often funded by licence fees paid by the industries which they regulate.
Click here for more information about regulators and regulation.
The Government published a draft Bill in November 2004 which lists Non-Ministerial Government Departments, as follows:-
*The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (ACAS) have traditionally been classified as (large) NDPBs (see below for a definition of NDPB) even though their employees were classified as civil servants. It looks, from the draft Civil Service Bill, as though their status may have changed or be changing.
** The Food Standards Agency is a very special case in that it is an NMGD which was created by merging two large parts of the Departments of Health and what was then the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The aim was to reassure the public (after the BSE/vCJD crisis) that decisions about food safety would in future be taken by an eminent and independent body free of political control. However, Ministers asked the FSA to continue to negotiate on their behalf in Brussels, rather than re-create shadow policy directorates within the original two departments. But because the FSA was designed to take politics out of food safety, it does not seek Ministerial approval for its negotiating position. Indeed, it agrees to European legislation on behalf of the UK, whereupon Ministers find themselves promoting and defending policies (i.e. when implementing the resultant European legislation) which they neither influenced or approved. This is constitutionally deeply unsatisfactory but perhaps pragmatically necessary, and may be a nice example of the flexibility of the UK's unwritten constitution.
A large number of civil servants also work in the Devolved Administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Note, however, that UK civil service statistics exclude those working for the Diplomatic Service and the Northern Ireland Civil Service.
There are a wide variety of other public bodies who do not generally employ civil servants (other than on loan from government departments). *The only exceptions (as noted above) are the HSE and ACAS which have not been classified as Government departments but whose employees are nevertheless regarded as civil servants.
The main categories are:-
There are around 1000 NDPBs (Non-departmental public bodies, more popularly known as "quangos":- Quasi Autonomous Non-Government Organisations) and they can be divided into four main categories. Around 300 are "executive", and employ their own staff. The rest are specialised legal tribunals of various sorts, or Boards of Prison Visitors, or "advisory". Some NDPBs are very large and/or powerful organisations such as the Environment Agency and the Competition Commission, as well as the special cases of ACAS and the HSE (*see above). NDPBs are accountable to Parliament (and are headed by "Accounting Officers") and have a complex relationship with their sponsoring department. They are, by definition, not directly accountable to Ministers and their employees (although often seconded from major departments) are not subject to the same constraints as their opposite numbers in their parent departments. For instance, Environment Agency officials will criticise polluting industries in terms which would not be used by officials from Ministerial Departments. However, NDPBs are set up to do jobs defined by, their budgets are allocated by, and their members are appointed by, their sponsoring departments. They are therefore hardly totally independent of those departments.
The National Health Service is in a category of its own as a huge central government organisation which has a large degree of independence but is otherwise constitutionally quite similar to NDPBs. It does not employ civil servants, other than on loan from e.g. the Dept of Health.
The Armed Forces are another major central government employer of public servants who are not civil servants.
Other public servants, but not civil servants, work for public corporations such as the BBC, the Bank of England, the communications regulator Ofcom, Royal Mail Group, British Nuclear Fuels, and the British Waterways Board, who run the canals etc.
The Financial Services Authority is a special case in that, although it is a limited company financed by the financial services industry, it exercises statutory powers and is treated for many purposes as part of government. Nevertheless, its employees are not civil servants.
Last, but not least, a great many public servants work for local authorities of various shapes and sizes, as well as in the police service.
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