Dividing the Spoils

Who HRs the HR Department?

If The Spectator is to be believed, the Cabinet Office’s HR department runs to 700 people. 700 HRs for a department of about 10,000. That’s one HR for every 14 Cabinet Office employees, or one for every 13 employees who are not themselves in the HR department.

But why exclude them? We must expect that a 700-strong HR department itself has its own HR needs, and on these ratios, they’d need around 50 people to do the job.

I don’t want to go to extremes, but if the Cabinet Office’s HR department’s own HR department houses 50 HR people, they themselves can expect to need another three or four HR people to look after them. That would be the HR Department for the HR Department of the HR Department of the Cabinet Office.

Probably that doesn’t happen.

Still, 700 people. Elon Musk has re-invented the car industry, has built gigantic factories around the world and set them humming with a workforce of around 70,000. Until recently, Tesla struggled along with a mere 450 in HR. I say until recently, because he’s just fired a third of them as excess baggage.

What do these HR honchos do all day?

One thing they do is collect and maintain an astonishingly detailed record of Cabinet Office employees. The manual describing what information they take, and how they use it, is 11 closely-typed pages long. These personal details are, of course, meant to be closely protected, but if you share secrets with 700 others, can you expect them to remain secret?

This is surveillance overkill of historic standards. In 1989, Wikipedia tells me that East Germany’s secret policy, the Stasi, employed 91 thousand people full time, with a further 173 thousand unofficial informants. So that’s 264k Stasi for an East German population of about 16 million, or one for every 60 Germans. Ha - the Cabinet Office could teach them a thing or two! But let’s accept that the Stasi’s official headcount shrank as the files got burned in East Germany’s last days. Official German estimates are that the Stasi had about 500,000 informants: that would get you to one Stasi for every 27 East Germans.

(This is, obviously NOT the Cabinet Office HR Dept HQ)

That’s still only half the Cabinet Office’s HR ratio.

Still, a former Stasi colonel reckons if you count every informal and occasional informant, you’re getting up to the 2 million mark. That’s one Stasi informant for every eight East Germans - finally, the Stasi gets bragging rights over the Cabinet Office’s HR department.

Does this matter? Yes it does, and not principally because it suggests a colossal waste of money. Rather, it tells you how Britain is actually run. Once again, it’s communist regimes which teach the lesson: in China, the Party controls by controlling who gets to occupy what position. They don’t call it HR, they used to call it the general administration bureau, and its job was to allocate the spoils. Its word was certainly more important than law.

My guess is that this is what the Cabinet Office’s HR empire is used for: to encourage, to discipline, and to direct. They are the mandarin’s outriders in tooth and claw, with the tools and motivation to make or break careers depending on the vigour with which their boss’s commands are executed, their dislikes checked, opposed, dismissed. All that information, after all. . . .

Now imagine you are a Cabinet Minister. You are, of course, determined to bulldoze through positive change for Britain (“Free summer rail travel for the young!”). Do you, as Shakespeare wrote ‘first kill all the lawyers?’. No, they can wait. First, deal with the Cabinet Office’s HR department. Because if you don’t, they can certainly deal with you.