The obesity of the energy department
Director's column
18 Jun, 2024
Andrew Montford
I recently chanced upon the so-called ‘organogram’ for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. This is essentially an dataset describing the organisation’s staffing. In fact there are two organograms, one for senior staff, and one for juniors.
The one for the senior staff is rather remarkable. The department has:
2 permanent secretaries
5 directors general
38 directors
166 deputy directors
There are something around 5000 staff in all.
It’s interesting to consider just how much money we might save on these bureaucrats if we were to abandon Net Zero entirely. There is sufficient detail on the organogram to come up with a figure. Precision is impossible – for many lines the number of staff is “<5” – but if we treat these as 3, and take the middle of the average salary scale, we can arrive at a cost for DESNZ of £318 million pounds per year.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/desnz-overmanning