Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many compromise agreements his Department has made with departing staff in each year since 2010; and how many such agreements contained confidentiality clauses.

Since January 2010 eight departing DCLG employees have signed compromise agreements.

None of these cases concerned an issue of "Whistle blowing" and none sought in any way to restrict the rights of an individual to make public interest disclosure under The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998.

None of these staff were forced to enter into these agreements and all received legal advice before they agreed to settlement.

The 2013 report by the National Audit Office into the public sector's use of confidentiality clauses noted how DCLG Ministers had stopped the previous Whitehall practices of payments being made for confidentiality clauses.