Recommendation 12

Ideally, all functions would have access to workforce statistics from a consistent civil service-wide data set. However, functions are still largely reliant on departmental data on staffing, which is variable in quality and is not always detailed enough for functions to use.22 The Cabinet Office told us that while it has more workforce data than ever before, it still has a way to go until the data available is granular enough to identify individual skills and shortages. It is keen to make sure that the functions are using standardised data, which is subject to the same definitions and approaches.23