The Ministry of Justice has topped an efficiency ranking put together by Civil Service World on the basis of data released in departmental business plans.

The Department for Transport and HM Revenue and Customs were the second and third most efficient departments, with the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Energy and Climate Change taking fourth and fifth place (see graph below).

To create the rankings, CSW took 2009-10 data from the annexes to departmental business plans published earlier this year, and ranked 17 departments in four key fields of annual spending: HR cost per full-time equivalent (FTE) employee; desktop PC cost per FTE; estates cost per FTE; and the value of goods and services bought for every pound spent on procurement. We then averaged each department’s rankings to produce a league table.

CSW also calculated the total spent by each department on desktop PCs, HR services and estates provision for every FTE employee. Using this system HMRC and MoJ seem to be the most efficient, spending just £6,073 and £6,686 respectively: HMRC’s results are boosted by the exclusion of procurement costs, on which the department does poorly.
The least efficient spenders were DCMS and the Treasury, which spent £18,607 and £14,294 per FTE respectively.

CSW carried out the calculations during research for a Special Report that analyses the data in business plans and the subsequent quarterly data summaries (QDS), which contain updated management information.

The rankings do not give a complete picture of departmental efficiency, since much of the data included in business plans is collected, defined and calculated in different ways around government.

Nonetheless, some trends can be identified: the most recent set of QDS, published last week, suggest that HR spending across the 17 main spending departments has dropped by seven per cent between January-March 2011 and April-June 2011, while FTE numbers dropped by two per cent.
The 2009-10 data also shows that just three large spenders account for more than half of all spending with ICT contractors, and that the Treasury and DCMS have the most expensive estates: each department pays more than £10,000 per FTE to run its estates.

The latest QDSs were published on the same day as departments released information on performance-related pay in 2010-11, monthly headcounts and salary costs for March to September 2011, and details of spending on government procurement cards from April to August 2011.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said that spend on government procurement cards has been cut by around 10 per cent across government, while reductions in performance payments made to senior staff have saved £15m.

He said publishing the spending and workforce data demonstrates the seriousness of the coalition’s commitment to transparency, and also “how seriously the civil service have taken their role in helping us to drive out waste at the very heart of government and get a grip on expenditure.”

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Written by Suzannah Brecknell, CSW