Senior Leadership Accountability: The Real Driver Behind HR Bloat
- Christiane Wuillamie
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Writing in The Times on 24 February 2026, Tom Howard reported that an oversized HR sector is costing British businesses billions. The data is compelling. But the diagnosis stops short of the real cause.
The Times Asked the Right Question. But Stopped Several Floors too Low.
The HR growth story is real. The explanation being offered is incomplete.
Tom Howard's piece in The Times, drawing on the Policy Exchange report published the same day, set out the scale of the problem in clear terms. The UK's HR industry is proportionally almost twice the size of the EU's and 60 per cent larger than the US equivalent. Between 2011 and 2023, HR headcount in the UK grew by 83 per cent, more than five times the pace of the wider workforce. Policy Exchange estimates the resulting misallocation of labour costs the economy £10 billion a year.
The report's explanation centres on EDI regulation: diversity targets, positive action provisions, and the shadow regulatory environment that compliance obligations have created. That argument has political traction. It has less analytical precision.
EDI policy did not cause senior leaders to stop managing their people. Middle managers were under-equipped for people management long before diversity reporting requirements arrived. The accountability deficit that drives HR growth is structural, long-standing, and sits at the top of the organisation, not in the Equality Act.
Until boards confront that, cutting HR headcount will not fix the problem. It will simply leave it unmanaged.
The Accountability Transfer
When senior leaders stop managing people, someone else must. HR fills the gap and grows to fill it.
People management is not a specialist function. It is the core obligation of every leader at every level. Feedback conversations, conduct concerns, workplace conflict, attendance issues, hiring decisions: these belong to line managers. Or at least they used to.
Over the past two decades, a quiet but consequential transfer has taken place. Senior leaders, uncomfortable with conflict or unwilling to spend political capital, have passed these responsibilities to HR. Policies have multiplied. Processes have expanded. HR headcount has followed the demand. The accountability that should sit with leadership has been systematically insourced to HR, and the organisation has called it governance.
In many businesses, line managers remain underprepared for the complexity of modern people management, yet they sit on the frontline of risk. That unpreparedness does not arise by accident. It is the downstream consequence of senior leaders who have never been skilled at people management themselves. Cost cutting is more revered than people skills.
This is not an HR problem. It is a governance failure and it sits several floors above the HR department.
The Middle Management Capability Gap
Organisations promote managers for technical excellence, then are surprised when they cannot manage people.
CMI and YouGov research finds that 82 per cent of new managers in the UK are "accidental managers" with no formal training, and one in three employees have quit a job because of poor management.
Most middle managers were promoted on the strength of their individual performance. Few received structured development in having difficult conversations, managing underperformance, or resolving team conflict. When a conduct concern arises, or a performance issue needs addressing, or a team dispute escalates the path of least resistance is to refer it into HR.
ONS analysis found that people management practices including performance reviews, managing underperformance, training and promotion were the practices most closely connected to productivity. Yet these are precisely the practices that organisations have allowed to migrate out of line management and into HR process. The management layer is left technically capable and people-management illiterate. HR absorbs what it should not need to handle. And so the bloat of HR continues.
If organisations genuinely want to free HR to focus on higher-value strategic issues, they must first address capability at the manager level. That is not an HR initiative. It is a leadership accountability question.
What the Times Debate Misses
Reducing HR headcount without addressing the accountability deficit is not reform. It is risk transfer.
The Policy Exchange report, as reported in The Times, makes a specific claim: that EDI policies are the primary engine of HR growth. That claim does not withstand scrutiny as a complete explanation.
The real issue is not headcount, but where HR capacity is actually being used. Organisations that have interrogated their own employee relations data consistently find that a large share of HR caseload consists of conduct concerns, performance disputes and team breakdowns issues that a competent, accountable line manager should be resolving directly, regardless of what the Equality Act requires.
Peter Cheese, chief executive of the CIPD, noted that increased employment regulation, shifting workforce expectations, and rapid changes in how work is organised have all expanded HR's remit. That is fair. But the regulatory environment does not explain why first-line management conversations are being routed into HR process at the volume and frequency they are. That is an accountability failure, not a compliance failure.
The two things can both be true. The regulatory burden is real and worth addressing. And senior leaders have used that burden as partial cover for a deeper, longer-running abdication of people management responsibility. Boards that conflate the two will produce structural HR cuts and find the underlying issues continue to arise, unresolved, at far greater legal and operational cost.
The Board Question That Is Not Being Asked
Reducing HR headcount is an operational lever. Restoring management accountability is a governance obligation and productivity lever.
Tom Howard's article in The Times, and the Policy Exchange report behind it, have done something useful: they have placed the cost of HR growth on the business agenda. The numbers are striking and the conversation is overdue. But cost conversations without root cause analysis produce the wrong interventions.
The structural question boards should be asking is this: does your organisation hold senior and middle leaders explicitly accountable for people management outcomes? Are those outcomes measured, reported, and tied to performance assessment and reward? If the answer is no or not consistently then HR will continue to absorb what leadership declines to own, regardless of how many HR roles are cut.
Boards that treat this as an HR efficiency question will get incremental savings and persistent risk. Boards that treat it as a leadership and management accountability question will get structural improvement
Key topics covered in this article
How Tom Howard's Times article and the Policy Exchange report frame the right data but an incomplete diagnosis
Why senior leadership accountability transfer, not EDI regulation, is the primary driver of HR growth
The role of the middle management people management skills gap in generating HR escalation volumes
Why cutting HR headcount without addressing root causes is risk transfer, not structural reform
How to map people management accountability hotspots across the organisation.
Practical people, policy and technology actions that rebalance accountability
Leading indicators and KPIs that measure management performance, not just HR headcount
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