Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, pursuant to the Answer of 19 February 2025 to Question 30700 on Department for Business and Trade: Staff, how many officials in his Department worked in roles relating to international trade in each year since its creation.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) operates a flexible resourcing model to support for matters relating to international trade, and not every employee in scope solely supports this function, full time. DBT defines the scope of this question to be employees whose primary profession has been recorded as “International Trade".

Statistics are available from the DBT Annual Civil Service Employment Survey and are published on Gov.uk.

The DBT was created in 2023, and official professions data specific to this department is only available from the 2024 survey. The figure provided includes payroll domestic, and UK based overseas staff in-post in DBT on 31 March 2024.

Professions data prior to 2024 was provided by DBTs predecessors, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for International Trade. This data is readily available on Gov.uk: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/civil-service-statistics