The Principality of Asturias downsized its staff to move from second to fourth in the per capita ratio of civil servants last year, according to data from the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Public Function. The regional administration provides 42,668 of the 61,218 civil servants registered in Asturias. The three autonomies with the highest volume of public employment by population are currently Extremadura, Navarra and Aragón.
Asturias reached its highest employment levels during the pandemic, with 43 workers per 1,000 people at the start of 2021, due to the health and teaching staff reinforcements the Principality needs to serve the areas with the highest covid-19. coup. At that time, Asturias was the second autonomous community with the highest proportion of public servants in relation to its population. A year later, the Principality had reduced its workforce from 43,571 to 42,668, and now the rate of 42 civil servants per thousand had dropped from second to fourth after surpassing Navarra and Aragón with 44 and 43 employees. public, respectively. Extremadura remains unchanged at the head of the country with about 49 civil servants per thousand inhabitants. At the other extreme, the Balearic Islands (27), Catalonia (almost 28) and Madrid (almost 30) are the least-staffed regional governments by population.
The community of Extremadura also leads the classification, with a rate of about 86 per 1,000 inhabitants, when considering public employees provided by the State and municipalities in its territory; in this relationship, Asturias, again Aragón, is eighth behind Castilla y León (60.5 officers); Castile-la-Mancha; Navarre, Madrid and the Canary Islands. In other words, just over two-thirds of the civil servants registered in Asturias are on the payroll of the Principality, which is in high demand in terms of human resources, the administration to which health, education and socio-health services depend.
During last week’s discussion of the state of the region, the Principality’s Head said, Adrian Barbonhe asked the Citizens spokesperson directly, Susana Fernandez, where he wants to cut things off. The MP of the orange group answered openly that he did not want to cut things off and instead focused on the need to remove bureaucratic barriers and promote digitalization in regional government in order to gain efficiency and agility.
The assumption of transfer in education and health has made the Principality one of the business engines of the region in the last two decades. Thus, the regional workforce, which was only 4,000 employees at the start of the autonomous community in the 1980s, has grown to over 40,000 in January 2020, a figure that was first surpassed before the outbreak of the pandemic.
The great economic recession in 2010 forced a halt in the growth of spending in Section 1 of the regional Budget. The policy of cuts and cuts has stabilized the bulk of its workforce at between 35,000 and 36,000 employees over five years, but with the economic recovery, the Principality embarked on an initially hesitant recovery that reached its maximum in the transition from 2019 to 2020. when it reaches 40,330 workers. The Covid pandemic broke all the seams and after just twelve months, the Principality’s payroll registered 43,571 employees and reached an all-time high of 43,778 workers at the end of the first half of 2021.
The latest photo taken earlier this year by the Ministry of Land Policy and Public Function shows that trend is curbing. However, this reduction does not mean a lower cost for the Principality’s public coffers, which allocates €1.909m to payroll in 2021 and plans a global item of 1.962m for this year. A figure that will have to increase for the 2023 regional accounts due to the rise in inflation and the review of the professional career supplement for thousands of health workers: The salary payment item will cross the 2,000 million euro barrier for the first time in a regional budget to exceed 5,000 once again.
While the Principality will have to initiate processes to reduce the provisional time, an obligation that it will share with the rest of the Administrations and which, in the case of Asturias, would mean the stability of 11,000 places in autonomy would not entail further costs for the State’s delegations and agencies and municipalities, since they have already been paid by now. structural duties held by temporary staff that have been part of Part 1 of the budget for more than a decade, and in some cases for more than two decades.