Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many external consultants work in his Department.

The Ministry of Justice currently has 34 Live Contracts to provide the Provision of Consultancy. As the Contracts are awarded to Companies on a project basis, the Ministry of Justice cannot establish the exact number working at a specific point in time. The number and seniority of consultants will vary depending on the stage in the project.

To establish the exact number of consultants we would need to interrogate both the files and Companies to obtain the information required and then review and collate that information. By doing so we would incur disproportionate costs in answering this question.

Temporary staff and consultants are only used to fill business critical posts and provide essential services where they can provide a fast, flexible and efficient way to obtain necessary skills that are not currently available in-house.