The EU's 170,000-strong army of bureaucrats
08 August 2008
A study released by Open Europe today finds that the EU now employs an "army" of bureaucrats.
170,000 people now work for the EU institutions. As well as those who work for the EU directly, the study finds that there are many more officials working for the EU indirectly. For example: working for the EU agencies; working for the EU overseas; sitting on EU policy committees; or working in the member states' representations to the EU. In total there are far more people working for the EU (170,000) than in the UK army (107,000).
The Commission claims that the EU's bureaucratic employees are "fewer than the number of staff employed by a typical medium-sized city council in Europe." But when the full picture is revealed, in fact, the EU employs the equivalent of the entire population of a medium-sized European city. Swansea, for instance, has roughly the same number of inhabitants as the EU employs.
In fact, the study finds that the EU now employs more people than the combined total of staff working for the Treasury (1,451), the Home Office (25,299), the Department for Work and Pensions (107,998), the Department for Health (3,467), the Foreign Office (16,169), the Department for International Development (1,612), the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (809), and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (7,854).
Open Europe analyst Nick Cosgrove said:
"The Commission desperately tries to play down just how many people are now working for the EU. They are extremely secretive about the number of people who are working to churn out regulations."
"These people are not elected, and cannot be held accountable by ordinary citizens. But they have a huge effect on our lives, affecting everything from the price of electricity and food to the way we run the NHS."
"The huge number of people now working for the EU reflects its huge influence. The difficulty of finding out how many officials are working there reflects the EU's wider problem with a lack of transparency. It is a complicated and opaque institution, which leaves it wide open to influence from lobbyists and vested interests."
The full calculations are available below.
Notes for Editors
1) For more information please contact Neil O'Brien or Nick Cosgrove on 0207 197 2333 or 07973 142775
The EU's 170,000-strong army of bureaucrats
"The day-to-day running of the Commission is in the hands of administrative officials, experts, translators, interpreters and secretarial staff. There are approximately 23,000 of these European civil servants. That may sound a lot, but in fact it is fewer than the number of staff employed by a typical medium-sized city council in Europe."
- European Commission pamphlet: "How the European Union works - your guide to the EU institutions"[1]
"50 reasons to love the European Union... number 13: Small EU bureaucracy (24,000 employees, fewer than the BBC)"
- The Independent, 21 March 2007
"Reasons to celebrate the European Union's 50th birthday... number 14: About 24,000 employees - fewer than the BBC employs - are helping 27 nations to come together."
- Denis MacShane, The Guardian's Comment is Free, 25 March 2007
Finding out how many people work for the EU is not straightforward. Figures cited by the European Commission and the pro-euro press are misleading, as they refer only to civil servants working in the Commission, neglecting to acknowledge the thousands of other officials who work in other institutions, agencies and committees to help make the EU function.
On its website, the Commission suggests that the number of people required to run the EU is 32,000 - the number of people working in the Commission. Some of its publications, including "How the European Union works - your guide to the EU institutions", even claim the number of "European civil servants" is 23,000.
A further dig into the Commission's figures - which are not readily accessible on the website - shows that its official calculation of the number of staff working for the EU as a whole is actually 43,564.[2]
But research by Open Europe shows that even this is a huge understatement. The actual number of individuals required to run the EU is in fact closer to 170,000 - more than 7 times the 23,000 figure sometimes cited by the Commission.
In order to function, the EU relies not just on Commission staff, but on a myriad of institutions, agencies, lobbyists, and experts, plus thousands of bureaucrats based in member states.
The Commission claims that the EU's bureaucratic employees are "fewer than the number of staff employed by a typical medium-sized city council in Europe." [3] But our calculations show that in fact, the EU employs the equivalent of the entire population of a medium-sized European city. Swansea, for instance, has roughly the same number of inhabitants as the EU employs.[4]
In fact, In fact, the EU employs more people than the combined total of staff working for the Treasury (1,451), the Home Office (25,299), the Department for Work and Pensions (107,998), the Department for Health (3,467), the Foreign Office (16,169), the Department for International Development (1,612), the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (809), the Department for Children, Schools and Families (2,707) and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (7,854).
As another point of comparison, the British army has 107,000 regular personnel,[5] making the EU's 'army' of bureaucrats far bigger. Meanwhile, the BBC, which The Independent has claimed has more employees than the EU, in fact employs 23,101 people, less than 7 times the amount employed by the EU.[6
1. EU institutions
Despite stating that it employs 32,000 people on its staff web page, the Commission's own breakdown of staff, also available on its website, shows that this figure is actually 34,335.[7]
While it is the biggest employer, the Commission is only one of many EU institutions. Other major institutions include: the European Parliament, the European Council and the Court of Justice, which are all integral to the functioning of the EU. According to the EU's 2008 General Budget these three bodies alone employ an additional 13,988 people.[8]
On top of this, the other institutions, including the Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Ombudsman the European Data Protection Supervisor, the European Central Bank and the European Investment Group and the European Administration School, employ an additional 5,100 people.[9]
Taken as a whole, the EU institutions employ some 53,423 people as core staff.
However, on top of these, the EU also employs thousands of other bureaucrats. In fact, the core institutions represent less than a third of all EU bureaucrats, since most of the EU's work takes place elsewhere: policies are drawn up and co-ordinated by committees whose memberships until recently remained secret, while much of the EU's executive power depends on devolved agencies and bureaucracies. It is in these unaccountable, unpublicised and, for many Europeans, unheard of groups that the bulk of the EU bureaucracy can be found.
2. Policy formulation & implementation - the committees
The legislative process of the EU is an extremely complex and opaque system, making it very difficult to identify how many people are actually involved in formulating, implementing and overseeing legislation.
However, research by Open Europe, using limited available information, shows that just to draft and work out how to implement legislation the EU requires a bureaucratic staff of around 62,026 people.
This figure reveals where the EU's real legislative work is actually done: in committees, behind closed doors and out of the public eye. Most of the work takes place away from the core institutions within Expert Groups, Council Groups, and what are known as Comitology committees.
Data available for the first pre-parliament stage, the Expert Groups, has only been available since 2004 following demands for greater transparency by Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde. Mr Bonde was at the time given a list of over 3,000 groups, but now the EU lists only 1,175 groups on its public register of Expert Groups[10]. Even so, with each group containing on average about 38 people, this part of the process involves a staggering 44,650 people.
These groups comprise individuals from institutes or businesses who may have expertise or an interest in the legislation being drawn up. Included in the EU's list are curious groups such as: the Lifts Directive Working Group (84 members), the Mineral Water Expert Group (60), and the Expert Group on Flavourings (70)
Legislation discussed in these groups is then passed onto the European Parliament (where in addition to the 8,190 employed by the EU Parliament there are 2,724 lobbyists[11]) and voted on. Approved legislation is looked over by Council Working groups, made up of delegates from the member states who discuss their respective disagreements with the legislation. This part of the process requires the involvement of around 2,600[12] permanent representatives in Brussels and the roughly 6,800 strong-membership of various preparatory groups who report to the national Ministers and representatives involved in the legislation[13].
Once agreed upon, implementation of legislation is undertaken by 247 'Comitology' Committees'. This requires the involvement of around 7,900 individuals (with on average 32 members per committee[14]).
3. Agencies & national bureaucracies
Once the legislative process is finished, the EU uses 36 devolved agencies in order to ensure compliance within member states. These agencies include, for example, the European Food Safety Authority (372 employees)[15], the European Agency for Safety & Health at Work[16] (64) and the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (Trade Marks & Designs) (742) [17]. Altogether these agencies employ in excess of 7,300 individuals[18]. Not all available information is up-to-date but what data is available often demonstrates continuous year-on-year growth in staff numbers.
The bureaucracy does not end here: EU law cannot be implemented without the co-operation of the bureaucracies of member states. Research by Dr. Max Haller in a book published this year conservatively estimates that between 17,900 and 36,200[19] employees of the national bureaucracies of the EU's 27 member states work on the implementation of EU directives.
Dr. Haller also notes the striking growth of the EU bureaucracy: since 1968 the core bureaucracy of the EU has increased fourfold (with no particular jumps in periods of enlargement). By comparison, the bureaucracies of member states were stable or in decline towards the end of the 20th century[20].
4. People working for the EU on missions abroad
In addition to staff based in Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg and the member states, the EU also employs a significant number of people outside its borders.
The EU also employs thousands of other people overseas, often as part of humanitarian or security deployments. Currently the EU has presences in areas such as Palestine, Bosnia, Darfur and Iraq, with 11 foreign missions in total. All this work requires European & local staff and in some cases the secondment of member states' armed forces (there are currently 600 British troops in Kosovo on behalf of the EU). According to the EU's own information, over 10,500 individuals are required to run these presences, with missions in Chad and Kosovo both involving in excess of 3,000 people each[21].
Conclusion: 170,000 EU people working for the EU
The Commission's "Statistical Bulletin" lists the number of permanent and temporary staff working in the European Parliament, the Council, the European Commission, the agencies and decentralised bodies, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Ombudsman, and the European Data-Protection Supervisor.
However, all of these bodies also employ what is known as 'external staff' - which includes contract staff members, seconded national experts, services of agency staff, and technical and administrative assistance. The statistical bulletin only includes the external staff of the Commission in its headline 43,564 figure, neglecting to add in the additional external staff in all of these other bodies.
On top of this, the EU employs thousands of 'experts', lobbyists and others who are absolutely integral to the day-to-day working of the EU, in particular, its legislation-making function. Add to this the thousands of people working on implementation of EU law in the member states, and the thousands of personnel which make the EU's overseas missions possible, and the actual figure for the number of people working for the EU looks more like 170,000.
Even this is a conservative estimate - given the lack of information available for several EU bodies, particularly for the number of external staff, and the evidence that the number of staff is growing all the time, the figure is likely to be even higher.[22]
Such a high number - at least seven times larger than what the Commission often admits to - is troubling since it is mostly comprised of staff operating out of the public eye and beyond the realms of accountability. The legislative process, for the most part, is dominated by unelected and unknown "experts", while those with vested interests have access at almost every stage.
A full breakdown of figures is available here
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[1] http://ec.europa.eu/publications/booklets/eu_glance/68/en.pdf
[2] Statistical Bulletin of the European Union. This is published every six months, but as of this year is no longer available in full on the Commission website. However it can be found here: http://www.es-isidarbinimas.lt/files/fckeditor_files//File/2008/BSR_200804_EN.pdf
[3] http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/about/who/index_en.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_Kingdom_settlements_by_population
[5] http://www.armedforces.co.uk/army/listings/l0086.html
[6] BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2007/08: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/pdf/bbc_ara_2008_exec.pdf
[7] Staff by DG http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/bs_dg_nat_en.pdf plus External Staff by DG http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/bs_externes_en.pdf
[8] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/data/D2008_VOL1/EN/nmc-grseqAP2000182/index.html correspondence on external figures for European Parliament, European Council and ECJ
[9] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/data/D2008_VOL1/EN/nmc-grseqAP2000182/index.html, ECB Annual Report 2007, http://www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/annrep/ar2007en.pdf , EIG Annual Report 2007, http://www.eib.org/attachments/general/reports/ar2007en.pdf , European Administration School http://europa.eu/eas/index_en.htm
[10] http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/search.cfm?l=all
[11] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/parliament/expert/lobbyAlphaOrderByOrg.do?language=EN
[12] http://europa.eu/whoiswho/public/index.cfm?fuseaction=idea.hierarchy&nodeID=3760&lang=en
[13] 1 to 2 members per member state, Presidency may send more http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/08/st11/st11301.en08.pdf
[14] http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regcomitology/include/comitology_committees_EN.pdf
[15] http://www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA/1178620777288/efsa_locale-1178620753812_AnnualReports2007.htm - Includes external staff found via e-mail
[16] http://osha.europa.eu/en/publications/annual_report/2007full
[17]http://oami.europa.eu/ows/rw/resource/documents/OHIM/annualReports/ar2007_en.pdf?identifier=435&download=true Plus external staff found via e-mail
[18] From latest available annual reports and websites of each agency (inc. Foreign/Sec agencies, Pol/jud agencies & Exec agencies) and external staff found via e-mail. http://europa.eu/agencies/community_agencies/index_en.htm
[19] Haller M (2008) European Integration as an Elite Process: The Failure of a Dream? London: Routledge pp. 165
[20] Op cit pp 162 [21] http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.asp?id=268&lang=EN&mode=g
[22] In addition, available external staff figures are valid as of June 2006