Whitehall left counting the cost of Covid

Speaking at last year’s Tory conference, Liz Truss mocked those ‘portents of doom’, the ‘people who say that it is inevitable that because of Covid we are going to have a permanently bigger state.’ But despite the insistence of Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others, all signs suggest that an enlarged Whitehall will in fact be the pandemic’s legacy.

A series of parliamentary questions by Philip Davies MP – no fan of big government himself – reveal that the total departmental headcount of eleven different ministries has risen by more than 15 per cent during the past two years. The total number of civil servants employed has risen from just over 206,000 in February 2020 to more than 238,000 at the last count in November 2022.

Worst offenders include the Department of Health and Social Care, where the number of civil servants has doubled from 1,766 to 3,978, and at the Department for International Trade, where headcount has increased by more than 50 per cent from 2,229 to 3,481.