Labour is recruiting a growing number of civil servants to bolster its preparations for government, with officials hired from No 10, the Treasury and other government departments.
Having poached Sue Gray, the party has been on a wider hiring spree across Whitehall for roles including covering data science, economic growth and engagement with businesses, the Guardian can reveal.
More than a dozen officials have taken the leap in the past 18 months, according to Guardian analysis of their LinkedIn profiles. Some ex-civil servants known to have moved from Whitehall to the Labour party have not updated their profiles, meaning the true number is likely to be higher.
With senior Labour figures fearing that a new government would inherit tricky public finances, the Treasury is the department from which the party has recruited the most.
In spring, Labour hired Nick Williams as its head of economic policy. He had worked at the Treasury for nearly six years as a policy adviser on science and innovation before moving to work on the government’s growth strategy in 2020.
A second former Treasury official, who was head of global financial partnerships for several south-east Asian countries and Switzerland, joined the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s team in May 2023.
Two other senior policy advisers in the Treasury have also joined Labour in the past 18 months.
New recruits have also come from further inside the heart of government. This month a data scientist working in No 10 moved to take up a job with the same title for Labour. Another Downing Street official who worked on parliamentary briefings made a similar move last September.
Also this year, the head of business engagement at the Northern Ireland Office joined Reeves’s team as a business relations adviser.
It was not just policy officials who made the move this year. A senior lawyer in the government legal department did so in April, becoming a legal counsel for Labour. A private secretary in the now defunct business, energy and industrial strategy department made the leap last July, going to work directly for Starmer organising his events and visits.
The hires are evidence that Labour is giving greater thought to the institutional experience it will need if it gets into government, said Alex Thomas, a programme director at the Institute for Government.
“It reflects where we are in the political cycle, around a year out from the election,” Thomas said. “The benefit of hiring ex-civil servants is they are people who understand the institutional architecture of Whitehall, so know how to get things done in government, which is a different skill from the campaigning skills of opposition.
“It’s also helpful to have people who speak the language. There is actually a whole language of officialdom that it’s useful to be able to translate. Thirdly, it gives Labour a network of relationships. The party have some shadow ministers who’ve been in government before , but the civil service is another source of expertise regarding how to translate a political idea into reality. It’s helpful to have people who know where the power lies and how the sausage gets made.”
