The obesity of the energy department
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.
Then, if we break it down to operating unit level, by selecting only those that are obviously related to Net Zero, we can see that there is a potential saving of over £200 million per year available by cancelling the decarbonisation farce entirely. This figure is just for the junior staff, so the true total would be higher still.
| Unit | Salary estimate £ |
|---|---|
| Carbon Capture Usage and Storage | 12,682,385 |
| Central Grants and Loans | 7,293,035 |
| Energy Affordability | 11,684,645 |
| Energy Development | 7,246,373 |
| Energy Infrastructure DG Office | 884,325 |
| Energy Markets and Analysis | 14,226,342 |
| Hydrogen and Industrial Carbon Capture | 17,259,811 |
| Implementation and Delivery Directorate | 6,906,387 |
| Industrial Decarbonisation and Emissions Trading | 14,184,362 |
| International NZ, Climate Finance and Strategy | 12,669,046 |
| International NZ, Trade and Energy | 8,049,651 |
| NZ Buildings - Clean Heat | 21,902,770 |
| NZ Buildings - Domestic | 15,689,982 |
| NZ Buildings - Portfolio and Affordability | 11,379,009 |
| NZ Buildings and Industry DG & NZ Strategy Delivery | 1,588,217 |
| NZ Strategy | 10,677,451 |
| NZ, Nuclear and International DG Office | 670,439 |
| Renewable Electricity Directorate | 8,002,992 |
| Science And Innovation | 10,629,277 |
| Smart Metering Implementation Programme | 5,745,367 |
| Strategy Directorate | 11,906,020 |
| Total | 211,277,885 |
£200 million is not to be sneezed at, and there’s probably another £40 million from closing arm’s length bodies such as the Climate Change Committee, the Low Carbon Contracts Company and Salix Finance. The latter is a body that distributes DESNZ grants to various third parties. Most of these grants would be savings under a no-Net-Zero policy, and so the exchequer would be saved another £500 million per year or so.
So we are up to £750 million or thereabouts, and we’ve barely started trying.