liancon is correct. In my former life working for a Government Dept I was never paid overtime and had no entitlement to overtime, regardless of how many hours worked. My impression is that the core civil service has a lot of atypical conditions such as no such thing as overtime and obligations to "get the work finished" no matter how long it takes. Its not unusual for some parts of the civil service to be working 60 hour weeks for no extra pay. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of quangos and other parts of the public service (usually the parts that are politically connected) are rife with overtime, extra attendance payments, allowances, sick leave etc. etc. The big losers in this are the core civil service.