MPs salaries to rise - as axe hangs over thousands of people in the civil service

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, parliament’s expenses watchdog, has announced that MPs’ salaries will rise by 2.8% to £93,904 in the next financial year. Thisis the basic rate - extra remuneration is given for more responsibility such as chairing committees.

IPSA said the decision was in line with wider government pay recommendations for public sector workers. Under the Parliamentary Standards Act, IPSA is required to review MPs’ salaries within the first year of a new parliament, by early July.

The watchdog said it would hold a further consultation on the determination of MPs’ pay for the rest of the current parliamentary term in the coming months.

This announcement comes as unions raise fears that up to 50,000 people could lose their jobs - and some services could deteriorate - after Rachel Reeves confirmed plans to cut civil service running costs by 15%.

The Chancellor said Labour was looking to cut back the Civil Service, which she said had swelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, by slashing its “back office functions, the administrative and bureaucracy functions” by the end of this parliament. She has mentioned a figure of 10,000 roles being axed - but unions have said it would be more than that.

FDA general secretary Dave Penman told ITV: “We’re talking about something that’s close to 10% of the entire salary bill of the civil service over the next three to four years. The civil service is about half a million staff. So that could be up to 50,000 staff who would go.”

How big is the civil service?

The UK Civil Service workforce is the largest it has been for nearly two decades - the PA news service has calculated - and has swelled by more than 100,000 in recent years due to the impact of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of 548,000 people were employed in the Civil Service as of December 2024, according to the latest available figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

This is up 2% year-on-year from 535,000 in December 2023, and up 21% from 453,000 in December 2019 just before the start of the pandemic. Headcount had fallen as low as 416,000 in June 2016, the month of the EU referendum. Since that date the total has risen steadily.

The latest headcount of 548,000 is nearly a third higher (32%) than it was in 2016, or an increase of 132,000. Of the 548,000, nearly 441,400 are full-time roles and the remainder are part-time positions.

The last time quarterly headcount was higher than the current figure was in September 2006, when it stood at 549,000.

The total was on a downwards path during the second half of the 2000s and this trend continued into the 2010s until the EU referendum in 2016, after which headcount began to climb.

It grew by 40,000 in the years between 2016 and the start of the pandemic, as thousands of people were recruited to manage the complex and lengthy Brexit process.

There was then a further jump once the pandemic was under way, as the Government hired staff to oversee huge projects such as the furlough scheme, testing for Covid-19 and the rollout of the vaccination programme. Headcount increased by 56,000 between March 2020, when the first lockdown began, and March 2022.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves told Sky News on Sunday she was “confident” the figure could be reduced by 10,000. This would take the current headcount down to 538,000 and reverse most of the increase in the 12 months to December 2024.

Two Government departments together account for more than a third of the full Civil Service headcount: the Ministry of Justice (17.6% of the total) and the Department for Work & Pensions (17.5%). The next largest are HM Revenue & Customs (12.7%), the Ministry of Defence (10.6%) and the Home Office (9.4%). These five departments together account for just over two-thirds of the total headcount.