Crown servant

In the United Kingdom, the phrases "Crown servant" or "Crown employee" are used to describe certain categories of public official of the Government of the United Kingdom. However, the term(s) are not consistently defined and can have different meanings in different contexts, the two most notable being in relation to employment rights and the Official Secrets Act.

There is no meaningful legal definition of a civil servant. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 following the Tomlin Commission on the Civil Service unhelpfully refers to "the civil service of the State".

The terms civil servant and Crown servant can coincide, but are sometimes exclusive. It is suggested that the phrase "Civil servant" may include every person who serves the Crown, with the exception of members of the armed forces of the United Kingdom, the Ministers of the Crown and the judiciaries of the United Kingdom. However, members of the armed forces are nonetheless Crown servants.

Crown employees (or servants) serve "at the pleasure of the Crown", and do not therefore benefit from the protections normally available to employees by law. However, the majority of these protections are applied to them by the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. For the purposes of the Act, "crown employment" means employment "under or for the purposes of a government department or any officer or body exercising on behalf of the Crown functions conferred by an enactment", though members of the armed forces are excluded from this provision, and the government has the ability to exclude other Crown servants "for the purpose of safeguarding national security".

Section 12(1) of the Official Secrets Act 1989 defines the expression "Crown servant" for the purposes of that Act. It now provides:

In this Act "Crown servant" means -

Paragraph (aa) was inserted on 6 May 1999 by section 125 of, and paragraph 26(2) of the Schedule to, the Scotland Act 1998.

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