Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether his Department has hired external public relations consultants since July 2024.
Answered by Alison McGovern - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government has not procured any consultancy relating to public relations since July 2024.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many agency staff were employed by his Department in each of the last five years.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
The Department publishes workforce information on a monthly basis that includes agency headcount. This can be found here for July 2024 onwards and here for the years prior.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, other than special advisers if his Department has appointed anyone from outside the civil service since July 2024.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
Since July 2024, the Department has appointed individuals from outside the Civil Service. Information on these appointments is published through the Public Appointments Service page and Direct Ministerial Appointments announcement portal, as appropriate.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many political appointees have been made by his Department since July 2024.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
We have taken ‘political appointees’ to mean special advisers. A list of special advisers by department is published each year in the Annual Report on Special Advisers which is laid in parliament. The Annual Report on Special Advisers 2026 will be published in due course.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether his Department permits civil servants employed in the UK to work from overseas on a regular basis.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
While it is possible to support employees who want to work from outside of the UK there is no right to do so and in many cases support will be impossible. The department does not allow people to work from outside of the UK without assessing risk on a case-by-case basis. The country the employee is asking to work from, the location within the country, the working arrangements and nature of the work the employee would be doing are examples of relevant factors. If an employee needs to take a department device abroad or they want to access our systems when they are overseas, they must get approval first.
There are policy limits on the amount of time any employee may be allowed to work outside of the UK. This is currently 2 weeks at any one time unless the employee is accompanying a partner on an overseas civil service posting. The actual limit will vary according to the circumstances of the request. There is also an annual limit on the amount of time anyone can work outside of the UK of no more than 6 weeks in any 12 month period.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether his Department permits (a) Ministers, (b) special advisers and (c) officials to use (i) Chat GPT, (ii) Google Gemini, (iii) Claude, (iv) Deepseek and (v) Grok as part of their official duties.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
The Government is committed to harnessing the benefits of artificial intelligence to improve the productivity of the Civil Service and the quality of public services.
Departments provide officials, Ministers and special advisers with access to secure, enterprise-grade generative AI tools that have been assured to the appropriate security standards and approved for official use. Ministers, special advisers and officials may only use generative AI tools that their department has approved for official use. The use of publicly available or consumer versions of generative AI tools, including those named in the Question, for official business is not permitted unless a department has specifically assured and approved that tool.
Approved enterprise tools are configured so that departmental data is held securely and is not used to train publicly available AI models. The use of generative AI across government is governed by the AI Playbook for the UK Government, which set out the principles for the safe, responsible and effective use of these tools.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have rolled out Microsoft Copilot across the Department as its approved AI tool to support the work of all staff. In specialist Digital and Data Science teams the use of Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT models is also being permitted.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to help support the level of footfall on high streets in South Holland and the Deepings constituency.
Answered by Nesil Caliskan
This Government is fully committed to rejuvenating our high streets. Later this year, we will bring forward a High Streets Strategy, backed by £301 million of support, to help turn the tide on the high streets most in need. The funding will support the creation of new High Streets Innovation Partnerships to reimagine and revive the country’s most struggling high streets and includes a further £10 million to support councils to deliver High Street Rental Auctions to reduce high street vacancy.
This comes alongside the £5.8bn Pride in Place Programme, with Boston, Spalding, and Skegness receiving £20m each over 10 years to be used by local people to shape their neighbourhood.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how much his Department has spent on advertising on podcasts in each of the last three years.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
This information is not held in the requested format and could only be collated at a disproportionate cost.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that survivors of domestic abuse are able to move from refuge accommodation into suitable permanent housing.
Answered by Matthew Pennycook - Minister of State (Housing, Communities and Local Government)
I refer the Rt Hon. Member to the answer given to Question UIN 105656 on 23 January 2026.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if he will provide a list of training programmes used by civil servants in his department since 2020.
Answered by Samantha Dixon
We define ‘training programmes’ as a broad term covering both individual courses (e.g. Advising and Briefing) and a collection of interventions under one scheme ‘banner’, (e.g. Beyond Boundaries).
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) provides training programmes for civil servants through a combination of cross‑government, departmental and locally procured learning alongside apprenticeships and structured development schemes.
Since 2020, Departmental capability-building activity has included learning accessed through Civil Service Learning and the Government Campus, which bring together core, functional and profession‑specific training across government. During this time, the Department has offered learning programmes covering topics including core skills, leadership and management, and specialist and domain-specific skills.
The Department does not hold a single centrally maintained list of all individual training courses undertaken, as learning is delivered by a range of teams. This includes a central Capabilities team, teams delivering profession-specific learning, and teams sharing domain-specific knowledge and best practice.