Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of offices in her Department whom third party advice agencies may need to contact cannot be contacted by secure email.

DWP adheres to Email Security and Policy guidelines when exchanging information with third parties.

We have a list of Trusted Partners who are deemed to have the appropriate security in place to allow us to exchange information with. If an organisation does not meet the criteria to be on the trusted partner list, we have an option to use software to encrypt e-mail between us and the third party which will then allow us to exchange data securely. Currently we communicate with 1100 external recipients via this method from 450 organisations. If the external agency cannot support either of the above then we would not be able to exchange information securely via email and would need to agree an alternative method with them.