Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what estimate he has made of the cost of using external agencies for recruitment of Senior Civil posts in his Department in each of the last five years for which figures are available.

The cost to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of using external agencies for the recruitment of Senior Civil Service posts in the last 5 financial years is set out in the table below:

We predominantly use external recruitment firms for specialist roles where the necessary experience and expertise does not exist elsewhere in the Civil Service