Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many staff in his Department are responsible for (a) processing and (b) responding to Freedom of Information Act requests; and if he will make an estimate of the annual cost to the public purse of this work.

The Department has a central team with a headcount of 13.8 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff who are responsible for managing Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and related appeals work. FOIs can be requested for any part of the Department's work. As such, various members of staff in the Department may at some point be involved with responding to an FOI request.

Most of these staff will carry out such work as part of their overall responsibilities. As such it is not feasible to determine, for the purposes of answering this question, precisely how many staff are responsible for processing and responding to FOI requests across the entire Department, or to provide estimates of the resulting costs.

Information on FOI volume and performance by department is published by the Cabinet Office, and is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics