Table of Contents
Summary
Technical talent in the civil service is key for the new Labour government to achieve its objectives, particularly given its commitment to reduce the cost to the taxpayer of employing consultants, and driving innovation and high-quality jobs across the UK.
To achieve this, the government must improve pay and other incentives to attract and retain skilled professionals in critical Digital, Data and Technology roles in the civil service.
The civil service struggles to recruit and retain technology personnel including in cyber security, data science, and IT operations. Civil service salaries lag behind the private sector.
This leads to delays and vacancies. For example, it took nearly three years to appoint a Chief Digital and Information Officer. The new government aims to improve public service delivery through adopting digital and data driven solutions: launching patient passports in the NHS and a National Data Library. However, the successful delivery of these will require technically skilled people inside the government.
To address this challenge, the government should make the Government Digital and Data (GDaD) capability framework mandatory for all departments and centralise the costs of salary incentives. This should be expanded to include cyber and data security roles, and protected by a ‘double lock’ in annual increases.
Building on the success of initiatives in the AI Safety Institute (AISI), the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) should consider selectively reclassifying other non-AI technology roles under R&D spending to make salaries more competitive.
While salary will never be the main motivation to become a civil servant, pay should signal that the government values these positions, and should meet a minimum threshold to compete with the private sector. For roles in science and technology, this requires meeting a higher bar than some other specialist roles.
The Challenge
Delivering on the new Labour government’s missions requires talent at the heart of government. However, uncompetitive salaries for Digital, Data and Technology roles hampers the government’s ability to recruit and retain talent.
This is a particular challenge for the new government, which hopes to deliver on digital public services, including NHS patient passports and a National Data Library.
Building a digital workforce in the Civil Service is no small feat. The Conservatives set a target for 6% of Civil Service roles to be in the Digital, Data, and Technology profession. Today, it is just 4.8% and has barely moved from the 4.7% the year before.
According to Alex Chisholm, former Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, one of the primary barriers in hiring digital and technology professionals is uncompetitive pay.
Similarly the former Deputy Prime Minister said “a cyber specialist knows they can earn five to seven times, if not more, for the same role in the private sector”. The previous government committed to improving salaries and a holistic offer for government technology roles, admitting “we must be competitive to stay ahead”.
To compete on salary, the previous government introduced the Government Digital and Data (GDaD) capability framework. The framework allows participating departments to identify critical roles, such as data scientist and software developer, and provide proficiency based pay uplifts. Some roles fall outside the GDaD framework, including data security and cyber security, though we understand similar salary incentives schemes are available.
It is unrealistic to think the government can – or should – match private sector salaries, bonuses, and perks. Matched salaries would drive up public spending and potentially further increase taxes.
The civil service offers job security, favourable pensions, a good work-life balance, social impact and training opportunities. However, it also needs a realistic offer on pay if it wants to attract the tech talent necessary for digital government.
For example, the UK National Cyber Security Centre recently posted a Lead Cyber Security Expert role with a base salary of £41,935, adding £6,250 for London weighting and skills payments starting at £8,840. If Departments face shortages with specific roles, they can also add retention allowances, which would bring the total salary to around £60,000. This is still far below private sector rates - where senior cyber security experts can expect to earn between £80,000-120,000, but £60,000 is far more competitive than the advertised base salary of £41,935.
Setting a minimum skill level for positions – based on the GDaD framework – before they are hired could allow departments to list actual expected salaries including skills payments. Displaying the base salary without skills-based add-ons can discourage people from applying.
While the GDaD framework successfully provides salary incentives, it is hard to know if it has been impactful. Only some departments are part of the scheme, and only a few have published details of its use; for example, the Ministry of Justice reported that it had boosted pay by £22 million for qualifying officials in 2022-23.
Moreover, wider trends cast doubt on the GDaD framework’s effectiveness. Without controlling for the relative seniority of professions, average Digital, Data and Technology salaries rank 16 out of 31 Civil Service professions, and only just exceed the median. Education and Training Inspectors, a group of just 1,000, lead the pay scale with a median salary of £80,740. Policy roles, which encompass 34,000 civil servants, hold the fourth–highest median salary at £48,790 - 12% higher than Digital, Data and Technology salaries (£43,350).
Other issues with the GDaD framework include the fact that pay uplifts do not respond to market rates and are not updated in line with inflation. Retention allowance payments are capped within grade bounds - i.e., you cannot earn more than the grade salary cap without changing jobs. Finally, departments are not automatically enrolled in the GDaD framework.
Low Pay Increases Reliance on Consultants
Without sufficient technical personnel, the government brings in consultants. From 2019-2023 spending on management consultancies increased by around 75%. In 2023, the majority (70%) of consultancy spend was on bringing in specialists to meet technical needs. Initiatives, such as COVID test and trace were a big part of this demand.
Economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington have argued that excessive use of consultants has been costly for government and undermined the ability of public institutions to meet citizen’s needs. Similarly, the Institute for Government has said that politicians consistently overstate the amount of money saved through outsourcing services and highlighted several high-profile contracting failures including welfare assessments. Research has also found that governments which use consultants demand them more as their own capacities diminish.
It is therefore no surprise that many former civil servants turn to consultancy. The government, which still needs their expertise, sometimes then contracts them back at a higher rate. This can create an unfortunate scenario where the government pays a premium to a consultancy firm to contract an ex-official who now receives a higher salary, but which is still paid for by the public purse. If salaries were higher in government, it is reasonable to think that many would not leave to become consultants - helping drive retention and save public money.
The new government has committed to stop “excessive” and “non-essential” spending on consultants, with the aim of halving spending from 2025-26 and saving £1.26 billion between 2024-2026. It is not clear how the government will meet this shortfall in personnel without retaining or hiring more civil servants.
Civil service headcount is at a 10-year peak, due partly to Brexit and the pandemic, so there is likely to be an overall decrease in the size of the workforce. Improving the salary offer for those working in digital, data and technology roles can improve the talent density even as overall civil service numbers fall.
The Conservative government put forward proposals to ‘strengthen the digital pay framework’ in their Civil Service People Plan 2024-2027, which Labour is not expected to cancel. Nevertheless, the plan has scant detail with the exception of an ambition to improve pay progression within grades.
The Opportunity
In 2023, the US launched a pay incentive scheme for technical roles in the Defense Department’s intelligence components, capping it at $183,500 (around £142,000). While this is still lower than comparable US private sector salaries, it is closer than the UK scheme and evidence suggests that it has improved retention. The US approach incorporates skills-based pay incentives directly into the base salary at a fixed rate per position. This diverges with the GDaD Framework, under which pay incentives are added to the base salary and are set based on skills assessments linked to a four-tier capability framework.
In Singapore, some parts of the government benchmark salaries against top US tech companies – Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Google and Amazon. High pay for government officials, even relative to the private sector, matches the strong financial incentives for elected members and ministers in Singapore: ministers earn around £645,000 a year.
The US and Singaporean approaches better reflect the cost of competitive salaries. For the UK adopting a similar approach to pay would be costly. If the Digital, Data and Technology profession grew to 6% of the Civil Service (30,000 staff), with salaries at £81,000 (top 5% earner), their total wage bill would hit £2.4 billion – 15% of total Civil Service salary costs or approximately 0.18% of total government expenditure in 2023.
This might suggest that consultants are actually cost effective, as the 2024-26 savings (£1.26 billion) are only half the annual wage increase, and pay top-ups do not factor in additional costs such as employer pension contributions. On the other hand, it also does not account for how GDaD framework payments are currently costed and only considers ‘non-essential’ consultants. Nor does it assess the impact on retention or whether more skilled tech personnel could reduce costs by digitising government.
Examples From Other Parts of HMG
To make a fairer comparison of impact, it is worth highlighting two other UK government initiatives.
The Pivotal Role Allowance is an incentive payment for departments to retain ‘flight risk’ senior civil servants in critical technical roles. Allowances are allocated to specific roles where there is a high risk of incumbents leaving and are removed when roles are vacated or the need passes. Payments are made in instalments and are proportionate to timescales, for example up to £20,000 for 24 months or up to £10,000 for 12. The notional cap on total allowance payments is 0.5% of the overall pay bill for senior civil servants (£670 million) or around £3.3 million. When combined with base salaries and GDaD framework pay incentives, salaries for the most senior technical roles can approach £200,000. However, the Pivotal Role Allowance only applies to current officials and cannot attract new talent, contributing to the nearly three-year-long delay in hiring a Civil Service Chief Digital and Information Officer mentioned above.
A good example of competitive civil service salaries is found in the AI Safety Institute (AISI), where salaries far exceed average civil service pay. The top salary for a grade 7 digital role in most departments is £78,000, while in AISI it is around double that figure. Because spending on salaries at AISI has been classed as research and development (R&D) under capital expenditure, it does not face normal salary restrictions. Clearly, where there is a will to pay technical civil servants more, a way can be found. The previous Conservative government’s focus on AI unlocked significant spending. A similar approach from the new Labour government, in a similarly targeted selection of technical roles, could deliver real impact in other areas.
Local and Regional Impact
The civil service aims to decentralise digital talent and embed expertise across the UK. In 2023, 79% of digital roles in the civil service were based outside London. Over a 5 year period, digital, data and technology roles were in the top 25% of civil service professions by share of personnel based outside of London and the South East. New thematic hubs and campuses, such as those in Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow are helping drive regional growth by embracing local digital talent and strengthening ties with academia and industry. Increased pay for technical specialists in these areas would support the government’s aim to promote economic growth across the UK.
Beyond salaries, the Civil Service has become a hub for technical training. Initiatives like the new TechTrack apprenticeship pathways foster in-house talent and promote mid-career retraining. Similarly, secondment schemes for technical talent provide a different approach to relying on consultancies and align with commitments to public-private-partnerships.
Plan of Action
People do not join the civil service to make a lot of money. For most people, the biggest drivers include the opportunity to create social good while also enjoying a stable and secure career path, an outstanding pension, and good work-life balance. However, while these factors are important, civil service salaries must meet a sufficient threshold to successfully recruit and retain talent. This is a particular problem when it comes to technical experts in science and technology, where private sector salaries are comparatively significantly higher.
To provide competitive technical salaries across government, and improve recruitment and retention, the Central Digital and Data Office, Cabinet Office and HM Treasury should:
1. Make the GDaD framework mandatory for all departments (with a cap on positions) and centralise the costs of salary incentives. This would help alleviate budget concerns that have deterred departments from adopting the framework, such as trade offs between salary costs and delivering essential functions. To avoid a misaligned incentive for departments to excessively hire GDaD professionals or misclassify roles, a cap should be set per department which is renegotiated periodically.
2. Pre-assess salaries for technical roles against the GDaD framework and adjust them prior to listing. This means that listed salaries would reflect actual total salaries, removing uncertainty for applicants, particularly those outside the civil service. Positions will also therefore need to have a baseline skill level rather than the tiered approach of the GDaD Capability Framework, similar to the US approach.
3. Reinvest cost savings from reduced consultancy spending to improve pay for targeted technical roles. This would help retain highly skilled personnel and allow a more competitive salary offering that will contribute to building in-house capability.
4. Explore guaranteed annual increases to GDaD Framework salary incentives through a double-lock mechanism. Consider committing to introduce a system where GDaD Framework incentive payments are adjusted annually to reflect inflation or an indexed increase or decrease in comparable private sector salaries. This approach could help align payments with market conditions, increasing their competitiveness. Similarly, this mechanism could also account for decreases in demand for certain positions due to sector-level use of efficiency technologies such as AI.
5. Make cyber and data security roles eligible for GDaD framework incentive payments (or similar). Extend the GDaD framework to include digital/technology roles in the Government Security Profession, such as Cyber and Technical Security. Harmonising frameworks prevents a double-standard for how government values similar technical roles.
6. Allow Digital, Data and Technology professionals to sacrifice employer pension contributions for higher salaries. Officials should be able to set the balance between their pay and pension.
7. DSIT should consider reclassifying select non-AI technology roles under Research and Development spending to provide more competitive salaries. Drawing from the success of the AISI, other key technology roles should benefit from enhanced pay structures to attract and retain high-calibre talent in government. While reclassification of personnel expenditure is not a cure-all, it is a good example of a proven mechanism to unlock higher salaries for targeted high priority roles.
8. Extend the number of technology positions that can receive pivotal role allowance. Pivotal role allowance - incentive payments to retain officials - should be expanded to cover certain technology positions at grades 6 and 7 such as Head of Cyber Security, Lead Infrastructure Engineer, and Head of Data Engineering.
FAQs
How do salaries for technologists across the civil service, UK private sector and international governments compare in practice?
There is not a good single source for this comparison. We therefore compiled the following table comparing salaries between the Civil Service, UK private sector and US government agencies across the 8 role areas listed under the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework.
Table 1: Comparison of civil service pay in the UK and US
We would like to stress that this table does not offer a comprehensive, nor an exact, comparison of salaries. It is a rough estimation that presents orders of magnitude.
To compile the table, we identified salary ranges of one or more open, or recently closed, positions for each of the 50 roles outlined in the GDaD framework across the Civil Service, UK private sector and US government. We found salaries through a mixture of live and archived job listings, as well as salary transparency platforms (Indeed, Glassdoor, ITJobsWatch, etc). Once we had found salaries for each role, we determined averages, lower and upper quartiles, for each of the GDaD frameworks’s 8 role types (data, architecture, etc).
Due to significant time required to conduct this activity thoroughly, there are several methodological issues which should be addressed to achieve more accurate findings. First, the data set should be expanded. Second, incentive payments should be systematically integrated - especially for government positions. In our search, we found that many roles where we anticipated there to be salary incentives did not list these and as such we could not properly account for them. Third, data should be broken down by additional variables including seniority and location. Fourth, a mechanism should be created to identify and assign significance to non-financial incentives e.g., work community, public healthcare/private insurance, annual leave, pension contributions, the cost of childcare, the cost of living, etc.
Making this comparison is deeply complex. And while the above table is not sufficiently rigorous, it provides an illustration of the order of magnitude differences in salary between the Civil Service and other employers.
Joseph Jarnecki is a Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. He has written extensively on international and domestic technology and cyber security policy. He holds degrees from King’s College London in Conflict and Security.
Natasha Buckley is a Research Analyst at the Royal United Services Institute. Her research includes disruptive and emerging technologies, national security and policy. Tash is also a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway University of London, her thesis focuses on the transition from cyber security to cyber power within strategy and policy in the UK.