Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what percentage of workers employed directly by her Department belonged to a trade union in each of the last five years for which data is available.

The Home Office does not hold this data. All of those Home Office employees who belong to a trade union now pay their subscriptions direct to these unions by direct debit. The Home Office therefore does not have access to this membership information.

The check-off trade union subscription facility, which enabled trade union members to have their membership subscriptions deducted via the departmental payroll, was removed in January 2015. Check-off records would have provided incomplete data on the number of employees belonging to a trade union as some trade union members would have been subscribing to their union by other means, such as direct debit.