The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is on course to cut more than one in five jobs in the five years leading up to March 2029, its permanent secretary has revealed.
Defra has already cut 15% of its headcount since March 2024, going from around 7,300 to 5,800 staff, Paul Kissack told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee last week. He said that by the end of the 2028-29 fiscal year, this percentage will have reached 21% – or around 1,500 people.
The department was ordered to cut 10% from its administrative budget in the 2025 Spending Review, Kissack told the committee – “and about two-thirds of our administrative costs at the department are in staffing, so it is inevitable that we will be looking to reduce our staffing”.
Kissack said Defra had begun to reduce its staffing numbers ahead of the Spending Review “to make early progress towards a reduction we knew we would need to make and potentially to provide a bit of headroom to bring new skills into the department while still remaining on that trajectory”. To this end, it ran a voluntary exit scheme through which about 300 people left, he said.
Kissack shared the numbers in response to a question from committee member Terry Jermy, who asked how confident the perm sec was that Defra could meet its statutory responsibilities “given what is quite a significant reduction in staffing”.
Jermy said the department and its arm’s-length bodies had seen “a loss of very experienced and competent staff”. He said farmers in his constituency of South West Norfolk had told him that they had found themselves telling visiting Defra officials what they should be doing. “That is a huge concern,” he said. “How are you ensuring that among the remaining staff there are the right skills and, perhaps more importantly, the experience?”
Kissack responded that retaining the right skills and experience is “an ongoing challenge for any department and any organisational leader”.
He said the department had turned down 240 applications for voluntary exits from people “whose skills and knowledge were needed within the organisation”.
“We made a judgement with the people we let go that there was an opportunity to be on our downwards trajectory and bring in the new skills that we need. Some of the skills that the department requires are continuous; certainly, the deep knowledge you describe will always be required, but skills needs are changing,” he said, citing data and digital skills needed to meet Defra’s efficiency targets. He added that Defra’s priority on staffing numbers is to try and hire more officials “to build up the areas that have immediate pressures”.
'Very worried' about people survey engagement scores
Kissack said he was “not alarmed” about the department’s turnover rate, which stands at around 13.7% – compared with a “long-running norm” of around 12%. He said nearly 5,000 people applied for jobs at Defra in October and it will be onboarding around 300 people in February and March.
But he said he was “very worried” about staff engagement. Defra’s score on this key metric fell in the latest Civil Service People Survey results, published at the end of February, putting it around five percentage points behind the civil service benchmark. “That is definitely not where we want to be,” he said.
Asked why engagement was low, Kissack said the department’s score “is not all about pay, but pay is an issue”.
He said that to tackle poor engagement, the department is working on three areas: improving staff’s sense of connection to the purpose of the organisation; line management; and development.
“We are a serious player in government and people should feel proud to work at Defra, but I do not think they always do. I do not think we always tell that story as convincingly as we should,” he said. “So a lot of the work I am doing at the moment is to try to instil a stronger sense of connection to purpose, which is really important to people’s sense of engagement.”
He also said the department is “getting back to basics on what good line management looks like”; and will improve how it communicates with staff about how they want to develop their careers and what support they need.
David Hill, Defra’s director general for strategy and water, who also appeared at the evidence session, added that the department is using its limited flexibility on remuneration and retention to add premiums to roles requiring high-priority skills. These include certain scientific and veterinary officer roles and some resilience and national security functions, he said.
'No immediate plans' to overhaul recruitment
Jermy pressed Kissack further on how Defra will ensure its staff are knowledgeable about farming and whether it will need to repeat the same training “year after year” due to high turnover. He asked: “Are you reviewing your recruitment processes? Presumably, you want to recruit people with that knowledge in the first place; is there a barrier? Are we ever going to move away from solely recruiting people who do not have that knowledge in the first place?”
The perm sec said he does not have “any immediate plans” to change its recruitment process.
“We recruit for the skills of the job and, generally speaking, we will be recruiting people who could in theory work in a number of different areas of policy,” he said. He said that most people who work in Defra long term end up working in multiple areas of the organisation. The department therefore does not tend to recruit for specific background knowledge, he said, though it values knowledge of farming, fisheries or the environment “if that is what someone brings into the organisation”.
“There will be certain jobs where we require a particular knowledge, but I would rather be bringing people into the department who have a passion for the work that we do, wherever that passion comes from, and that we fulfil their passion by giving them interesting and useful work and getting them out on to farms,” he added.
Asked if there are areas that do not have as many staff as he would like, Kissack said Defra’s work on Brexit and water are both facing a “time-limited element” where they need a lot of staff to deliver reforms. He identified these as the only two areas where he might say: “That’s a big priority area, we have a lot of work to do, and we don’t have enough people.”
He said he had confidence in the farming directorate’s capacity, while Defra had restructured to “put more weight” behind its work on restoring nature, environmental planning and interaction with the wider planning system.
Asked to give examples of areas that had lost staff to ensure these priority areas are well resourced, he said the NOx programme – which aimed to reduce roadside concentrations of nitrogen oxides – had “come to the end of its time”. Defra has also reduced its central comms budget, closed down an international strategy team and slowed down some aspects of its animal welfare work. And it has slowed down or paused some elements of its work on biosecurity, “but not the areas we think are highest risk”, Kissack said.
The overall vacancy rate across Defra is around 5%, he added.