The numbers are striking enough on their own.
Since Boris Johnson’s government in 2019–20, the salary bill for special advisers in Whitehall has risen from £6.9 million to £12.4 million in the most recent financial year — a near-doubling that has occurred against a backdrop of stalled welfare reform, sluggish economic growth, and a public growing visibly impatient with the pace of change. The headcount of so-called spads has climbed from 102 to 155 full-time equivalents, while the Civil Service itself has expanded from 423,770 to 523,635 staff. The highest-paid members of this politically appointed cohort have drawn salaries of up to £159,999.
A Machine That Keeps Growing
These figures arrive at a particularly uncomfortable moment. Polling by Opinium finds that nearly seven in ten Britons — 69 per cent — regard Sir Keir Starmer’s government as unsuccessful, with just 21 per cent taking the opposite view. Two in five voters judge the outgoing administration to have performed worse than Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government; only one in four says it has done better. For a government that came to power with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and considerable public goodwill, the verdict is sobering.
The expansion of the advisory apparatus is now drawing pointed criticism from across the political spectrum, with the sharpest fire coming from the Conservative benches. Shadow Cabinet Office minister Mike Wood argues that Andy Burnham, who is set to assume the premiership, will inherit “a Whitehall packed with Starmer’s apparatchiks” — advisers, in his telling, who have been rewarded despite the government’s failure to address the country’s most pressing fiscal challenges. Chief among those challenges is welfare spending, which reached £314.9 billion in 2024–25 and is forecast to rise to £408.6 billion by 2030–31.
Sir Keir’s attempt to tighten benefits entitlement was derailed last year by a backbench rebellion, and there is widespread scepticism that his successor will find the political conditions any more favourable. The structural problem — a welfare bill that crowds out defence spending, infrastructure investment, and tax relief — remains unresolved, and the machinery of government has, if anything, grown larger in the interim.
The Conservative Response
Alex Burghart, the Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a close ally of Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, has set out a clear counter-proposal. He has pledged to return the Civil Service to its 2016 staffing levels, a reduction of approximately 132,000 posts, which he estimates would save £8 billion annually. That saving, he argues, could be redirected to cutting business rates on the high street and abolishing stamp duty on the family home — a supply-side offer aimed squarely at the productive economy rather than the administrative state.
The argument finds support among business groups and fiscal watchdogs. John Longworth of the Independent Business Network, which represents family firms, questioned bluntly what the expanded Civil Service is delivering for the money spent. William Yarwood of the TaxPayers’ Alliance was similarly direct, warning that “Britain is crying out for a leaner state; not another empire of advisers, insiders and Left-wing placemen.” Callum Price of the Institute of Economic Affairs pointed to the underlying structural risks — ballooning national debt and sclerotic economic growth — and cautioned that the new administration would need a credible plan if it is to avoid repeating its predecessor’s failures on welfare and growth.
The Institutional Question
Former Leader of the Commons Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg offered a sharper analytical point: that Labour’s simultaneous dependence on Civil Service unions and distrust of the Civil Service itself has produced a paradox, with ministers compensating for institutional unreliability by hiring ever more expensive political appointees. The result is a dual cost — a large and growing permanent bureaucracy alongside a parallel layer of politically loyal advisers — without the reform that might justify either.
Danny Kruger, who is developing Reform UK’s policy platform for government, argued that the problem is not merely one of cost but of institutional culture. “Whitehall is already stuffed full of Left-wing apparatchiks,” he said, adding that Labour’s inability to grip either the Civil Service or the welfare bill suggests the party “is simply not serious about tackling the biggest challenges facing our country.” His conclusion — that Burnham will never deliver real reform — reflects a broader pessimism about whether the existing machinery is capable of the structural change the fiscal position demands.
A government spokesperson defended the adviser expansion, stating that special advisers “play a critical role in providing advice and support to the Prime Minister and other Government ministers” and that their numbers reflect “the scale of the government’s ambition.” That framing will do little to satisfy critics who note that ambition, however generously staffed, has yet to translate into a sustainable welfare settlement or a materially stronger economy.
What Burnham Inherits
Andy Burnham steps into Downing Street with a formidable institutional inheritance — and a formidable institutional problem. The Opinium polling suggests that more than one in three Britons already regard his forthcoming decisions on tax and spending as likely to be unfair, with only 24 per cent expecting fairness. That scepticism, combined with a welfare trajectory that demands urgent attention and a Civil Service that has grown substantially larger without obvious gains in effectiveness, sets the terms of his challenge with unusual clarity.
The case for a leaner, more disciplined public administration is not ideological decoration. It rests on a straightforward fiscal arithmetic: a state that spends an ever-larger share of national income on its own internal workings has less capacity to invest in defence, infrastructure, or the tax reductions that might stimulate private sector growth. Whether the incoming prime minister recognises that arithmetic — and whether he has the political will to act on it — is the question that will define his early months in office. The machinery he inherits is large, expensive, and, by most independent assessments, not obviously delivering value commensurate with its cost.