An excellent initiative from Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office has given us a new insight into the staffing of "Ministerial and non-Ministerial departments, their executive agencies and Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs)" (i.e. this should basically be everything but the actual big services like the NHS, schools and the police). Although the survey is apparently incomplete at the moment, you can get hold of the data here.
I can already see some interesting conclusions from running simple sums:
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- Those organisations have over 584,000 full-time equivalent staff. Those staff cost over £20.1 billion, or £34,000 each.
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- They have 10,279 full-time equivalent agency staff costing £600 million,
or £58,000 each.
- They have 10,279 full-time equivalent agency staff costing £600 million,
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- They have 1,564 full-time equivalent consultants costing £691 million, or an incredible £441,000 each.
This isn't a big, raw database like the COINS database was. It's a nice friendly spreadsheet and the data is broken down by organisation so there is a huge amount of detail. Download it and see if you can spot anything interesting. Let us know if you do.
Update: Apparently the DWP think there might be a problem with the data. They think that for one of the organisations (the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority) the amount of spending on consultants is right but the number of consultants is wrong, if the actual total is higher that could explain why spending per consultant is so high.