Reflecting on our work as 2025 ends
By Kate Owen, Chief Executive, Civil Service Commission
As 2025 comes to an end, it’s a good moment to look back at what the Commission has been doing across our expanded areas of responsibility, and what the latest data is telling us about recruitment and conduct across the Civil Service.
Recruitment Principles: exceptions
Between January and November 2025, the Commission considered 442 exceptions to the Recruitment Principles. This is slightly lower than the 453 cases considered over the same period in 2024. As in previous years, a significant proportion of these cases related to senior roles: 176 (39.8%) were at or above SCS Pay Band 2, including 27 cases at Pay Band 3 or above. The overall profile is broadly consistent with last year, and helps us focus our conversations with departments on the appropriate and proportionate use of exceptions as part of broader Civil Service recruitment. Next year, we’ll be reporting on the follow up to the 2024 review of appointments made by exception.
Complaints and what they tell us
Complaints are an important part of how we provide public assurance and also understand how recruitment processes are working in practice. From January to November 2025, we responded to 269 out-of-scope recruitment complaints, up from 146 last year. Over the same period, we investigated 18 in-scope recruitment complaints, compared with 43 in 2024.
We also responded to 196 out-of-scope Civil Service Code complaints, an increase on the 134 received last year. As in 2024, there were no in-scope Code complaints investigated by the Commission. We published updated guidance on Code complaints on our website to help clarify who can bring complaints to us and what to expect.
We continue to use themes emerging from both Code complaints and recruitment complaints to help shape our guidance to potential complainants as well as to inform our training and engagement with departments.
Oversight of senior recruitment
Our independent Commissioners completed 220 Commissioner-chaired competitions between January and November 2025, compared with 133 over the same period last year. By personally overseeing senior recruitment, we provide independent assurance that these appointments are made fairly, openly and on merit - as well as reinforcing the importance of open competition in bringing in new external talent so the Civil Service has the skills needed to deliver the government’s agenda.
Using audits to support improvement
Our Recruitment Principles audit programme remains a central part of our assurance work. In 2024/25, we completed 71 departmental audits, 39 of which were full audits. Thirteen departments received a good rating, 20 were rated fair and six required improvement. We issued 196 recommendations to help departments strengthen compliance and improve recruitment practice. Audits for the remaining departments will be completed over 2025/26 and 2026/27, completing a three-year audit cycle.
Supporting departments to apply the Recruitment Principles
A key part of our approach is helping departments to get recruitment right first time. Between August and October 2025, we delivered six Recruitment Principles training sessions, covering areas such as common breaches, exceptions, job advertisements, reserve lists, audits, and Commissioner-chaired campaigns. Each session attracted several hundred attendees with a total of 3700 attendees over the year. It is very encouraging to see this level of enthusiasm for practical and shared learning.
Alongside these open sessions, we also continued to work directly with individual departments to provide tailored training and outreach, often linked to their audit findings or specific organisational needs.
Looking ahead, we have published a programme of Recruitment Principles workshops for 2026. Take a look and sign up here.
Openness and public engagement
Being open about how we carry out our role is an important part of being a regulator. In March 2025, we held an online event, ‘Meet the Commissioners’, which was open to the public and attended by over 400 people. Chaired by the First Civil Service Commissioner, Baroness Gisela Stuart, alongside Atul Devani and Martin Spencer, the event gave participants a clearer picture of how Commissioners oversee Senior Civil Service recruitment and the safeguards in place to ensure fair and open recruitment.
The First Commissioner also joined HMRC Permanent Secretary, JP Marks, Alex Thomas and Atul Devani to talk about our role in recruiting senior leaders and developing talent at the Institute for Government on 3 November.
Business Appointment Rules
In October, following the closure of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, we took on the new role of considering applications under the government’s Rules from senior civil servants. Between 13 October and the end of November, we considered 20 cases involving some of the most senior former roles in the Civil Service and published our first quarterly update to the Minister for the Cabinet Office, outlining the work underway to streamline the process and provide thorough, timely advice to applicants.
Finally…
Over the year ahead, we will continue to draw on the evidence from our casework, complaints, audits and engagement to focus our efforts where they are most needed, support departments to meet the Recruitment Principles, and provide independent assurance that appointments to the Civil Service are made fairly, openly and on merit.
I’d like to thank our Commissioners, our staff team and all those we work with right across the Civil Service for their engagement with our work this year - and wish you all a happy and healthy 2026.
