ALB Staff

Keywords

ALBs, Arms Length Bodies, Public Bodies, Quangos, Public Bodies Directory, Civil Servants, Public Servants

ALB staffing: Headlines

In 2022/23 ALBs employed

390,808 Staff (FTE)

The ALB workforce has increased from

318,714 in 2020

HM Revenue and Customs Employed

63,738 FTE

and are the largest ALB employer.

Reclassification of Network Rail in 2022 added

41,147 FTE

to this total.

ALB employee types

In 2022/23, there were 390,808 staff (FTE) who were employed by Arm’s Length Bodies.

Civil Servants: Of this total, 62% of staff employed in these organisations were Civil Servants. Within the ALB landscape, Civil Servants work primarily within Non-Ministerial Departments and Executive Agencies.

Public Servants: Public Servants made up 38% of the workforce, and are primarily employed to work in Executive Non-Departmental Public Bodies.

Mixed Workforces: A tiny proportion of around 0.08% of the workforce were employed in Advisory and Tribunal NDPBs, where staff may be either Civil or Public Servants. Staff employed in these organisations are often employed in a part-time basis, and may spend part of their time working for other ALBs or their sponsoring departments.

A pie chart showing the breakdown of the different types of staff employed by ALBs, based on their classification in 2022/23. The chart has 2 main components - Civil Servants make up around 62% of the workforce, whilst Public Servants make up around 38% of the workforce. A very small slice represents less than 0.1% of the workforce who are a mix of Public and Civil Servants, typically employed by Advisory and Tribunal NDPBs.


Departments sponsoring ALBs with the largest workforces

While ALBs employed around 390,808 staff (FTE), the vast majority of these staff (268,754) were employed by ALBs sponsored by just 5 departments, representing 68.8%. The departments sponsoring the largest ALB workforces were: Minsitry of Justice (82,493), HMRC (67,519), and Department for Transport (66,912). As a Non-ministerial department, HMRC operates as its own sponsor, whilst also sponsoring the Valuation Office Agency.

A lollipop plot showing the size of the combined ALB workforces employed by ALBs under each sponsoring department. The largest bars in this plot are Ministry of Justice (around 82,500 FTE) and HM Revenue and Customs (around 67,500 FTE). The smallest bar represents the single ALB sponsored by Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland (around 3.24 FTE). The plot also shows that over two thirds of all staff employed by ALBs were in organisations sponsored by just 5 departments.


ALBs by geography

Scope of Influence

The vast majority of ALBs sponsored by UK Government departments have operational scope within England (97%). Most ALBs also operate within Wales (76%), whereas less than half operate within Scotland (48%) and Northern Ireland (45%).

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024

Headquarters locations

The location of headquarters of ALBs sponsored by the UK Government are spread across the UK. The vast majority of ALBs have their headquarters in London (126), whilst the South West (24) and West Midlands (20) had the second and third most ALB headquarters respectively. The North East (2) and Northern Ireland (3) were the regions with the least amount of ALB headquarters. 73 ALBs (around a quarter of all ALBs) reported that they have no designated headquarters.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024


London-based staff

While the majority of ALBs have their headquarters based in London, the majority of the ALB workforce is based outside of London. Within the total ALB workforce of 390,808, the majority of staff (335,599) were employed outside of London, representing 85.9%. This trend reflects the Government’s wider Places For Growth programme, which aims to create more opportuntities for the Civil Service to deliver in areas outside of London.

A pie chart showing that the majority of the ALB workforce are employed outwith London. Around 86% of all FTE employed by ALBs are based outwith London, and the remaining 14% are based within London.

Largest ALB employers in London

Of the 55,209.25 staff employed in London by ALBs, 29,554.3 where employed by 5 ALBs, representing 53.6% of all London-based ALB staff. The ALBs with the largest London-based workforces were HM Revenue and Customs (9,165), HM Prison and Probation Service (7,483), and Network Rail (6,918).

London-based ALB staff proportions

While the ALBs above employed the most London-based staff, the majority of these ALBs still employ most of their staff outside of London. For example, whilst HMRC employed around 9,165 staff in London, they employed around 63,738 outside of London, meaning only 14% of HMRC’s entire staff were based within London during 2022/23.


Comparisons with 2020

When compared with the number of staff employed by ALBs in the Public Bodies Directory from 2020 (318,714 FTE), the number of staff employed by ALBs has increased by more than 72,000. Most of this is attributable to changes in the NDPB workforce, which increased by nearly 46,000 staff during this time period. Notably, this increase largely reflects the addition of Network Rail as an Arm’s Length Body which had around 41,000 staff in their workforce during 2022/23.

A horizontal grouped bar chart showing the collective size of each ALB Classification's total workforce, compared between 2023 and 2020, when data was last published by Cabinet Office. The bar are on the x-axis, and each classification shows growth between 2020 and 2023. The largest is the Executive NDPB classification. Annotations highlight that much of this jump in FTE between 2020 and 2023 are attributable to the formal classification of Network Rail as an ALB in 2022, which added around 41,000 FTE to the total alone. The chart is coloured in two colors: dark red and dark blue, with the dark red representing 2023 data, and the dark blue representing 2020 data. An annotation also flags that the overall total increase in ALBs' FTE is mainly driven by the increase in the NDPB workforce.


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