Home Office Spends Over Half A Billion Pounds On Temporary Staff In Two Years

The Home Office spent well over half a billion pounds on temporary staff in the last two years as it tried to tackle a backlog in asylum applications.

The department spent £269.9m in agency fees last year, according to its latest annual accounts. The figure is a slight rise on the £254.2m recorded the year before, meaning well over half a billion pounds have been spent in the last two years.

The expenditure represents unprecedented highs for the Home Office, and over three times what the department spent on agency fees before Covid. In 2019-2020, the department spent just £88.8m on temporary staff.

The rise in spending on agency staff coincided with record levels of staff turnover across the civil service, with churn in Whitehall departments hitting its highest levels since 2010 over the last two years.

Some 12 per cent of Whitehall staff either changed jobs or left the government workforce altogether in 2022-2023, the latest year where data is available, down from 13.6 per cent the year before, but still higher than any point in the preceding 14 years.

A separate report by the Institute for Government think tank in May 2023 found that staff morale in the Home Office was “consistently among the weakest of Whitehall departments” and was “beset by myriad cultural and institutional problems”.

In its annual report, the Home Office said its agency costs were “to deal with backlogs in migrant casework, passport application / examination, and asylum applications”, including working on the last government's now-cancelled Rwanda deportation scheme.

Further costs came, it said, as a result of the need to “support the police to cut crime and make the UK safer for women and girls” and “to assist the Home Office with our transformation