Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much his Department has spent on (a) consultants, (b) temporary staff and (c) contingent labour in each of the last five years; how many people have been so employed; what the length of contract of each such person was; and what equivalent civil service salary band each was on.

The spend for consultants, temporary staff and contingent labour has been published in the Ministry of Justice annual report and accounts, which can be found at the following links:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ministry-of-justice-annual-report-and-accounts-2011-12 (page 31 for 2010/2011 & 2011/2012)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ministry-of-justice-annual-report-and-accounts-2013-to-2014 (page 33 for 2012/2013 & 2013/2014)

As the contracts for Consultancy 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 Agency and Interim staff we would need to interrogate both the MoJ files and Companies data 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.