EU bureaucrats outnumber British army two to one, say campaigners

Christopher Hope
London Telegraph
Monday, Aug 11, 2008

A study released by the Open Europe think tank, which wants to control the influence and scale of the EU, has found that 170,000 people now work for EU institutions.

The group claimed that the difficulty of finding out how many officials worked in Brussels showed a lack of transparency and left the EU open to “influence from lobbyists.”

Open Europe said the figure is nearly six times more than the 32,000 Brussels bureaucrats which EU bosses have traditionally claimed are needed to run the EU.

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The Commission has previously claimed that its bureaucratic employees are “fewer than the number of staff employed by a typical medium-sized city council in Europe.”

However, the new figure, including EU staff working remotely from Brussels, is more like the entire population of a small city such as Swansea or Portsmouth.

The 170,000 employees is nearly twice as large as the British army and is greater than the number of people working at eight Whitehall departments including the Treasury and the Home Office.

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