Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of the additional staff required by his Department in the event that the UK leaves the EU (a) with and (b) without a deal.

Over 80% of Defra’s agenda is affected by the UK’s departure from the European Union and as a result many roles across the Defra group are now supporting work related to our departure from the EU, either directly or indirectly. We are unable to disaggregate between ‘deal’ and ‘no deal’ planning work.

As at the end of November, Defra group has recruited over 2300 staff including fixed term appointments, interims and staff redeployed from elsewhere in the group, to work on the UK’s departure from the EU. Over 2100 are already in post with the remainder working through pre-employment processes.

We are continuing to recruit further additional staff to support work related to leaving the EU and we are currently advertising or selecting to fill an additional 250 posts.

Resourcing activity is expected to be on-going through 2019/20 however we are currently in the process of finalising our total people resource requirements for the year following receipt in late December of a further £410m of Government funding to enable us to prepare to leave the EU on either a deal or a no deal basis.