On the 15 October, in what the Cabinet Office terms a ‘huge stride forward for government openness’, the government published new details about civil servants working at the heart of government. Along with a fresh wave of information detailing civil servant salaries over £82,900, government departments have released detailed ‘organograms’ showing how departments are structured.
These charts set out details of the number and grade of staff working in different departments. They include the names, job titles and salaries for all senior civil servants at director level or above, as well as the job title of all senior civil servants at deputy director level, along with the number of staff in their team and the breakdown of their grades.
The professed aim is to build on the government’s drive for transparency and accountability. Where before the public could only access a breakdown of total civil servants by department (through the Office for National Statistics), now they can discover which areas they work in. In theory this provides unprecedented insight into the structure, focus and size of government departments and does throw up some interesting findings. For example, education has over twice as many people working in its press and marketing operations (427) as in the section dealing with academies (211), while it emerges from data on HMRC department that Corporation tax and VAT accounts for only 755 people, compared to 6,295 on benefits.
In reality the information is not yet complete and presented mainly in pdf format rather then csv, making third party use of the data more difficult. However, its publication is in line with the government’s transparency agenda setting the release of data, not its quality, as the main priority, and represents another welcome step towards public scrutiny and engagement in the processes of government departments which are accountable to them.
Sean Kirwan
The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age 
This is definitely an excellent innovation. I would like to add that each post should provide a 1000 word description of the position.
It seems to lack the information required to create an organisational chart as there is no ‘manager’ field. This might be deliberate as transparency in certain situations might be a security risk but i would think that in most cases this should not be a problem.