British civil service

Civil Service

Logo of Her Majesty's Civil Service
Organisation overview
Website	www.gov.uk/government/organisations/civil-service

Her Majesty's Home Civil Service, also known as Her Majesty's Civil Service or the Home Civil Service, is the permanent bureaucracy or secretariat of Crown employees that supports Her Majesty's Government, which is composed of a cabinet of ministers chosen by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as two of the three devolved administrations: the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government, but not the Northern Ireland Executive.

As in other states that employ the Westminster political system, Her Majesty's Home Civil Service forms an inseparable part of the British government. The executive decisions of government ministers are implemented by HM Civil Service. Civil servants are employees of the Crown and not of the British parliament. Civil servants also have some traditional and statutory responsibilities which to some extent protect them from being used for the political advantage of the party in power. Senior civil servants may be called to account to Parliament.

In general use, the term civil servant in the United Kingdom does not include all public sector employees; although there is no fixed legal definition, the term is usually defined as a "servant of the Crown working in a civil capacity who is not the holder of a political (or judicial) office; the holder of certain other offices in respect of whose tenure of office special provision has been made; [or] a servant of the Crown in a personal capacity paid from the Civil List". As such, the civil service does not include government ministers (who are politically appointed), members of the British Armed Forces, the police, officers of local government authorities or quangos of the Houses of Parliament, employees of the National Health Service (NHS), or staff of the Royal Household. As at the end of March 2016 there were 418,343 civil servants in the Home Civil Service, this is down 3.6% on the previous year.