Let's collaborate to create an organisational plan for the Ministry of Magic.

Let's assume, for the sake of this thread, that there are around 20,000 wizards in magical Britain (around 130 births/year, with an average life expectancy of 150).

Of the wizarding population, around 2,350 would be under 18. If we say, for the sake of the thread, that wizards tend to retire by age 100, let's say that means there are around 6,500 retirees.

So that leaves us with a total adult working population of 11,150. Of those, let's say 30% are unemployed: homemakers, the idle rich, those between jobs, the long-term sick, and the destitute.

So that gives us around 7,805 wizards in work at any one time.

In Muggle Britain, 16.5% of all workers are in public employment. That figure includes the NHS, so you might expect the wizarding level of public employment to be lower. But on the flipside, the Muggle world has no equivalent to the Statute of Secrecy, which is a major undertaking and the Ministry's primary occupation. So let's say that the wizarding economy involves a slightly higher level of public employment than the Muggle one - say, 20%.

That gives us a total Ministry workforce of 1,561. Just by way of an immediate impression, that feels kinda... about right, based on the size of what we see in canon. It would also mean that the Ministry "task force of 500" which worked on the Quidditch World Cup Stadium was about one third of the Ministry's manpower, which feels reasonable for such a large project involving a significant part of the global magical population visiting Britain.

We have 1,561 workers to play with.

The first step, I think, is to divide this number between the different departments. Those are:

• Department of Magical Law Enforcement
• Department of Magical Games and Sports
• Department of International Magical Cooperation
• Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes
• Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures
• Department of Magical Transportation
• Department of Mysteries

On top of these, some individuals will need to be kept in reserve for miscellaneous offices without clear locations such as:

• Caretakers (Magical Maintenance Department)
• The Minister for Magic's Office
• Committee on Experimental Charms (perhaps part of DMLE or DoM)
  
• Department of Magical Education & Wizarding Examinations Authority
• Blorcyn's Quango for Unified Asclepial Care and Knowledge Standards (QUACKS) - St Mungo's oversight.

So, does anyone want to take a first stab at distributing our 1,561 staff around the departments? Bearing in mind that we're told in canon that DMLE is the largest department.

Edited to fix the numbers & for Blor's post.

 

There’s one thing I’m certain of. For too long St. Mungo’s has had too many hot-shot Healers doing what they want, by Merlin. They’re a law unto themselves. I suggest a quango, to operate reportedly-independently, overseeing their duties and establishing onerous bimonthly non-magi-medical tasks for them to complete to keep them off-balance, avoiding racketeering, and therefore encouraging patient centric Healer priorities. I’d suggest that every time the committee chair changes, educational standards are changed and these standards are retroactively applied, with a sharp time period for Healers to requalify. Idle hands are Voldemort’s play things.

I would therefore propose four members and a chair from the Undersecretarial staff, and hopefully some non-executive non-ministerial roles for concerned citizens such as Malfoy, or upstanding public figures such as Rita Skeeta.

We could call it the Quango for Unified Asclepial Care and Knowledge Standards— QUACKS for short. I suggest their budget is from the ministry, but with a slight reshuffle into a similar but legally distinct form they could also extract fees from the Healers, as an obligatory membership fee.

As an exceedingly small body, would you mind adding this to your over-list? This way they’re easily missed, by not reporting to any particular department head, and can act more unilaterally (for the patient good) by requiring very little oversight. Thank you.

 

• Department of Magical Law Enforcement: 400 with 50 to 80 Aurors, the rest are grunts and bureaucrats.

• Department of Magical Games and Sports: 25 wizard

• Department of International Magical Cooperation: 200, my reasoning for this that other countries didn't seem to have helped with the Voldemort situation and countries are generally isolationist, I think it'd be a department that focuses on extradition, international trade and regulation and keeping the image of cooperation more than any actual cooperation. A big number of these employees would be ambassadors/overseers to/on various magical countries.

• Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes: 100 wizards, it probably takes a substantial effort to hide magic from the muggles, specially when you consider muggleborns, criminals/blood purists and idiots.

• Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures: 50 wizards, same reasoning for the above but with Dragons.

• Department of Magical Transportation: 40 wizards, Considering Apparation seems widespread this seems like it'd be a small department, probably works with the International Magical Cooperation to ensure travels to and from other countries.

• Department of Mysteries: 60 wizards, research and safekeeping/destruction of dangerous artifacts.

• Caretakers: 20 wizards.
• The Minister for Magic's Office: 15 wizards, secretaries and spokesmen/women.

 

So I'd start with a top down approach.
50 .Executive
1 minister of magic with a secretary, senior and 3 junior undersecretaries, as well as personal staff of 7. (7 and 13 being good magical numbers).
7 department heads
Each of the above should have a personal staff of 3-5, more for law, less for sports.

18. The minister of magic should have a permanent protection detail of 4, each department head 2.

50. Wizengamot has around 50 members, and let's say that they don't really get staff. The books describe them more like a jury than a parliament with subcommittees.

30. Let's say DoM is the smallest (fewer people more secrecy). So it will have 1-5 researchers per room, the books show us the entrance chamber has 12 doors, so let's presume there are 10 research rooms, average 3 per room, so 30.

300 .Law enforcement will need to be huge. Ministry of magic was founded after the act of union with Scotland, so there doesn't need to be an institutional doubling with a merger. Since distance is irrelevant between floo and apparition, we don't need districts or precincts. The US police ratio is 2.3 per 1000. In strife prone areas, like under military occupation or where locals have incredible firepower, that rises to 20 per 1000. If a wand doesn't qualify as incredible firepower, I don't know what does.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw0uNDAeI6g6A9VEMdcIBuB5
So when not fighting a Voldemort insurrection, I would say there are 150 aurors/hit wizards. Then you should have an equal number of support staff to handle the paperwork.

Call it 100 for international cooperation, aka customs and diplomats.

Creatures will need 150, with a good chunk of them being the treasury and dealing with goblins.

Transportation shouldn't be big, maybe 50.

100. Accidents I would say is a common occurrence, given poor Neville's youth and magics frequent capacity to explode.

Leaves 35 to referee quidditch, inspect brooms, and be Ludo Bagman.

And 25 caretakers.

 

You seem to be missing around 4000 adult non-retired wizards from your calculation?

I think a lot depends on how much the wizards exploit muggles to allow for a relaxed lifestyle. If you can pretty much steal all raw materials and foodstuff from the muggles, you can have a lot larger portion of wizards not doing anything. Meaning your employment-to-population ratio could be a lot lower than the 70% stated, which is pretty good for a modern western country (OECD averages at around 65%)

 

I'm going to take a bit of a different view from other folk I think, I don't think the DMLE would be hundreds of folk. I'd go with the following breakdown:

• Aurors - 15 (2 shifts of 5, with a night shift of 2, with 3 floaters/injured/holidays etc)
• Hitwizards - 30 ( 2 shifts of 10, night shift of 5, with 5 floaters/injured/holidays etc)
• Improper Use of Magic Office - 1
• Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office - 2
• Back Office - 10 (Head of Department, Deputy Head, plus 8 admin folk of varying seniority)

My logic is that with rapid transport you don't need such huge numbers to cover the country. And you don't need huge amounts of back office staff because magic lets them get the paperwork sorted out quickly, and in many cases probably automated to a large extent. As a note, I initially had the numbers of Aurors and Hitwizards a bit higher. But I realised they're probably prime candidates for budget cuts because they're likely some of the highest paid employees.

So thats a DMLE of 58.

The 2 largest departments would be Accidents and Catastrophes, and Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. My logic is that these are the 2 departments most responsible for maintaining the Statute of Secrecy. Given the number of wizards necessary to deal with some magical creatures, I could see that department having 200 or so. And Accidents and Catastrophes probably needs a lot of capacity of resource, just in case of big situations or lots of small ones. So another 300 or so there is probably likely.

I reckon that International Cooperation is probably going to have a fair few. If only to have a single representative in most of the major players on the world stage. They maybe only have a small office staff in London, 5 or so folk maybe. But then say...100 spread out around the world.

Department of Magical Transportation is an interesting one. I think the staffing numbers there would probably depend on how resource dependent different modes of transport are. If the floo network, for example, is constantly needing a couple of dozen "engineers" running around making adjustments and keeping it running smoothly thats going to up the overall staffing numbers. If I was world building, I'd probably go with the trope of a network of rune stones around the country that I would have serve as the backbone of portkeys and the floo. There's probably a fair bit of work would go into the upkeep of that network, being easily damaged by all sorts of major and minor factors. On the flip side, the Department could easily be written in as having a staff of maybe a dozen total. A couple of folk to install new floo points and fix broken ones, someone to issue portkey licenses, someone to administer apparation exams, etc.

Games and Sports, I'd say is probably looking at a staff of 40 or so. Especially if you're including referees and such of the Quidditch league as employees of the department.

Mysteries I'd agree with the proposal above of 3-5 researchers per room. That makes sense in practical terms, thats the right size for a small focused team of specialists.

Ministers office I imagine would be somewhat bloated. Politicians like to be surrounded by hangers on, and large staff size always makes you look important. And then I'd probably say the Ministers office would have responsibility for liaising with the Wizengamot in its legislative capacity, and so you've probably got some policy experts and such there who draft or review legislative proposals.

 

I think we can save quite a bit of manpower by outsourcing certain parts of our duties.

For example I had this great Idea that we let Gringotts handle all things concerning inherentence, surely a goblin bank is the best place to judge what objects rightfully belong to wizards.

 

Yeah, my bad. I seem to have accidentally taken the number of retirees as the number of the remaining workforce. And the OECD comparison is interesting as I didn't check that. However, in a world with greater gender equality like the wizarding world, I kinda feel like there will probably be fewer women in long term homemaker type positions, so perhaps a slightly lower ratio (i.e. 70%) is justified.

Revised calculation:

There are around 20,000 wizards in magical Britain (around 130 births/year, with an average life expectancy of 150).

Of the wizarding population, around 2,350 would be under 18. Wizards tend to retire by age 100, let's say that means there are around 6,500 retirees.

Wizarding Britain therefore has a total adult working population of 11,150. Of those, approximately 30% are unemployed: homemakers, the idle rich, those between jobs, the long-term sick, and the destitute.

Therefore around 7,805 wizards are in work at any one time.

Around 20% of the workforce are in the public sector. That gives us a total Ministry workforce of: 1,561.

I actually like this better. The Quidditch Stadium task force being 1/3 of the Ministry instead of over 1/2 feels more intuitively correct.

 

On the subject of the Statute of Secrecy, I'd see it more as a how many do you need for day-to-day secrecy and how many do you need as "surge" staff during an emergency, rather than a large full time work force. I know Taure that you've previously talked about that being their primary job, and I agree, but 99% of the time there won't be any emergencies that require loads of staff.

So I would propose that each department has a small number of staff dedicated to secrecy (i.e. Magical Accidents has staff who obliviate muggles who see magical accidents, Magical Creatures has staff who do dragon and such sightings etc), but almost everyone at the Ministry is trained to obliviate muggles, so when something so big the dedicated clean-up staff can't deal with it they pull everyone in from the department and if that's not enough the whole Ministry.

If they need a massive dedicated clean-up staff full time then they'd get found out the first time something big happens (which I assume happens a few times per year) and don't have enough to cover all their bases. Day to day clean-up staffing needs can't be huge because of that.

 

To interject a bit of canon into the discussion, the DMLE has 4 distinct "law enforcement" roles in canon. Aurors (some are apparently in the Investigation Department, others are not), Hit Wizards, Magical Law Enforcement Patrol, and Witch Watchers.

Witch Watchers are only mentioned in the films, in the visible Daily Prophet text. In PoA an article mentions "hundreds of Witch Watcher Special Forces" being deployed after a sighting of Sirius. I wonder whether special forces in this context is like the UK police special constables, rather than military special forces, so they're lower skilled, lower paid, basic officers who deal with the mundane community relations for the most part? But if there are hundreds of them, it certainly would require my estimated staffing of the department to be increased substantially!

 

Witch Watcher sounds more like something the DLME should be pursuing than supporting. That said, I think, if you wanted to incorporate the movie sort of take-it-or-leave it canon of Witch Watchers I'd make them like special constables too, or a reserve force. Community bobbies who patrol. Or perhaps, considering the nature of the geographic spread of the magical population, even a twitching curtains brigade. A semi-endorsed national neighbourhood watch, if that makes sense?

 

Yeah, Witch Watcher really doesn't sound like a professional law enforcement gig to me. Honestly if I was writing a fic and needed a name for some secret cabal of muggles who know about the wizarding world and are convinced wizards are going to be end of humanity, I might call them Witch Watchers.

Unpaid volunteers whose job is principally to watch their local area for breaches of the Statute, and occasionally do other things like maybe provide a first response to immediate crises until the Ministry can show up. Except the context of them being mentioned was being deployed to a specific town in response to a sighting of Sirius. You wouldn't deploy minimally trained civilians in response to a mass murdering, terrorist convict escapee being spotted surely.

 

Witch Watchers could be made to be some sort of Neighborhood Watch organisation. Filled with busy bodies with too much time on their hands who are ment to act as the DMLE's eyes on the ground, with orders to call for help if they see anything worth reporting.

 

There'd be little need for more law enforcement. In a community of 3,000 people spread out over the British Isles, it'd be overkill. The Hit-Wizards would maybe be the only full-time staff, with a handful of people who deal with shit like Muggle-baiting. Aurors would be like firefighters, able to chill and be on call but have fuck all to do 99% of the time. Like, what are Aurors doing re: Sirius Black in 3 and 4 that requires more than 1 or 2 folks dedicated to chasing down leads (if that)? In times of a dark wizard, the force would need to be expanded.

But that's however long Voldemort's reign lasted in the 70s and a 3 year period in the 90s. Hardly reason to pay more than a few folks the decade or so in between.

Just a poorly designed world, unfortunately.

 

The premise of the thread was a population of 20,000, not 3000.

 

I don't think 20,000 changes the dynamic much, but apologies for being unable to move past the 3,000 number whenever this stuff comes up . There's still too much law enforcement with the idea of creating or including the Witch Watchers. The Hit-Wizards would be equivalent to street cops, the Aurors as detectives, with the latter being even more specialized - and therefore lacking in steady work.

 

I agree the idea of hundreds of Witch Watchers doesn't make much sense, just wanted to bring the note of canon to the thread.

I do prefer my initial numbers of having a handful of aurors working at any given time. We know they undertake protective work, and also learn skills like stealth, disguise, and tracking. I think there's probably sufficient work in a population of 20k to keep 3-5 Aurors occupied for a shift, especially if they have long running projects and investigations.

 

I think Witch Watchers as their name implies are scouts, they have the task of reconnaissance and keeping an eye for magical activity.
It would also explain why they were stationed on the lookout for Sirius, if they manage to track down fugitives their goal is to keep an eye on them and call for reinforcements.

 

If you look at muggle police officer numbers they range from 100 per 100k population to 1700 per 100k population.

Even if you assume 200 people in the DMLE, that every single one is an "officer" and there are no pencil pushers that still only puts them in the 1000 officers per 100k range.
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I always assumed Hit-Wizards were basically Aurors but without the detective training. Probably something that was created for the first war to pad out the numbers.

 

To be fair muggle criminals can't teleport and they don't have massive easily concealable firepower, moreover wizards population is scattered. You'd need more officers if only for them to be stationed at various points of interest.