Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much the Probation Service has spent on agency staff in each month of the last five years.

Agency staff may be used to fill business-critical posts and support essential front-line services, where they can provide a fast, flexible and efficient way to obtain necessary skills that are not currently available in-house.

The requested information has not been collated centrally and obtaining it would involve a detailed analysis of archived probation trust data. This would be a significant exercise and could not be done without incurring disproportionate cost.