Home Office Spends Over Half A Billion Pounds On Temporary Staff In Two Years
3 min read
The Home Office spent well over half a billion pounds on temporary staff in the last two years as it tried to tackle a backlog in asylum applications.
The department spent £269.9m in agency fees last year, according to its latest annual accounts. The figure is a slight rise on the £254.2m recorded the year before, meaning well over half a billion pounds have been spent in the last two years.
The expenditure represents unprecedented highs for the Home Office, and over three times what the department spent on agency fees before Covid. In 2019-2020, the department spent just £88.8m on temporary staff.
The rise in spending on agency staff coincided with record levels of staff turnover across the civil service, with churn in Whitehall departments hitting its highest levels since 2010 over the last two years.
Some 12 per cent of Whitehall staff either changed jobs or left the government workforce altogether in 2022-2023, the latest year where data is available, down from 13.6 per cent the year before, but still higher than any point in the preceding 14 years.
A separate report by the Institute for Government think tank in May 2023 found that staff morale in the Home Office was “consistently among the weakest of Whitehall departments” and was “beset by myriad cultural and institutional problems”.
In its annual report, the Home Office said its agency costs were “to deal with backlogs in migrant casework, passport application / examination, and asylum applications”, including working on the last government's now-cancelled Rwanda deportation scheme.
Further costs came, it said, as a result of the need to “support the police to cut crime and make the UK safer for women and girls” and “to assist the Home Office with our transformation plans and to deliver our digital strategy”.
The backlog of aslyum claims awaiting processing has risen sharply in recent years. At the end of 2022, 132,000 cases were waiting for a Home Office ruling, most of whom had been waiting over six months. While it has fallen since, it still sat at some 95,000 cases at the end of 2023.
Tory MPs James Cleverly and Suella Braverman both served as home secretary in the last two years (Alamy)
While many government departments have yet to release their annual accounts, the Home Office also seemed to be spending far more than other branches of government on agency fees.
The Department for Transport spent some £152m, The Department for Work and Pensions nearly £174m and the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government less than £34m.
Fran Heathcote, general secretary of PCS trade union, which represents civil servants, told PoliticsHome that “a fully funded civil service with more, better-paid, civil servants benefits everyone because it means the wheels of government turn more quickly and more smoothly”.
She added that they welcomed moves from the new Labour Government to increase civil service staffing and reduce spending on agency workers.
A Home Office spokesperson said that the department had reduced its temporary staffing from 5,781 people to 3,376 as of July this year and was planning to “reduce them further”.
They claimed that the high use of short term staff did not reflect a permanent shortage of staff but “temporary demand”.
They told PoliticsHome: “Agency and contingency labour is used to support temporary demand and does not reflect a shortage of staff. We have reduced our numbers of temporary staff over the past 12 months and are continuing to reduce them further.”
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