London has more than 16 times as many top-level civil servants as the north-east of England, with 23,350 such roles based in the capital, leading to an “inbuilt bias” in decision-making, according to a Conservative politician in the north of England.
Top-level civil servants – working at grades six and seven, or in a senior civil service-level role – comprise more than a quarter of London’s civil service, the highest percentage in England, compared with 5% (1,400 workers) in the north-east and 6% (3,260) in the north-west.
Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor for Tees Valley, said the uneven spread of policymakers across the country was discriminatory. “If you’re a policymaker in London deciding where the cash goes, of course there’s an inbuilt bias,” he said.
He said these senior workers – who are typically paid between £60,000 and £100,000 but can get £140,000 or more – had the greatest influence over government ministers and shaped policies affecting the rest of the country, despite so many of them being clustered in the capital.
“If you get the tube to work every day, you want to see new shiny trains. If you go out at weekends you want to see new museums and landscaped parks. If you can’t afford to get a mortgage on a pokey London flat, you want to see investment in social housing,” he said. “That’s why you see London getting investment: the people who make the decisions have been based there for too long.”
Although an advocate for a shakeup of the civil service to have more decision-makers in the regions, Houchen said simply relocating or creating public sector jobs “out of thin air” would not address the imbalance.
“That’s the easy way out,” he said. “The real challenge is generating real growth in our economy by attracting private investment and generating real wealth to pay for the vital public services we use. While we need government agencies to move out of London and the south-east, it won’t solve all our problems.”
Steve Rotheram, the Labour metro mayor of the Liverpool city region, said: “The whole point of devolution is that at a local level we are able to make decisions about our future better than Whitehall mandarins who know nothing of our specific local circumstances.”
He said the imbalance had practical impacts for the north. “In health, where being born in the north of England can take a decade off life expectancy; in education, where Ofsted figures show 135,000 more secondary school children being taught in underperforming schools; and in transport, where London gets £419 more per head than the north of England.”
Outside of London, the rest of the south of England has more top-level civil servants than the north. The south-west of England has more than double the percentage of top-level civil servants than the north of England, with 13% of its civil servants in these positions.
