Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Brexit
(asked on 13th May 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many staff in his Department who were transferred or seconded to work (a) in other departments or (b) on other departmental briefs on preparations for the UK to leave the EU, have since returned to his Department.
Answered by
David Rutley
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
EU departure is an all-of-Government operation. The Department for Exiting the European Union is responsible for overseeing negotiations to leave the EU and establishing the future relationship between the UK and EU. The Department for International Trade works to secure UK and global prosperity by promoting and financing international trade and investment, and championing free trade.
Departments continually review workforce plans and reprioritise and assess changing needs, which includes identification and cessation of non-priority work where appropriate. We have accelerated our plans, and at the same time, the Civil Service as a whole is working to ensure that exit implementation is carried out to a high standard without impacting public service delivery across the whole of Government.
For Defra, information relating to all staff who have been transferred or loaned to another department since June 2016 is provided below. We are not able to confirm how many of these were related to exit roles as this information is not held.
We have interpreted the second part of the question relating to ‘other departmental briefs’ as those working on projects with or in other departments through any informal arrangement that is not a formal loan or secondment. Based on this interpretation, Defra does not hold this data and is unable to provide this information.
The information is from June 2016 – present.
Total number of staff transferred to another Government department (OGD) between June 16 – March 19 | 445 |
Number of staff transferred to an OGD who have since returned to Defra | 0 |
Total number of staff loaned to an OGD between June 19 – March 19 | 118* |
Number of staff loaned to an OGD who have since returned to Defra | 14 |
*This figure includes 30 loans where the end dates are between May 2019 and January 2022, and therefore we would not expect staff to have returned to Defra. All loans are generally for a period of two years.
We do not use the term ‘secondment’ to refer to Civil Servants moving between departments, instead we use the term ‘loan’. Therefore we have interpreted this question to refer to those who have moved to other departments on loans.