Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of trends in the level of job vacancies in key professions within his Department’s responsibilities, including contractor organisations.

The Ministry of Justice has not undertaken a central assessment of trends in job vacancies across key professional groups. Workforce planning is devolved to individual business groups, which are responsible for assessing their own staffing requirements and monitoring vacancy levels in line with operational priorities. This includes oversight of contractor organisations supporting the department, who are similarly responsible for overseeing their own workforce needs. Through established governance and performance-management arrangements, the department maintains oversight to ensure that services continue to be delivered effectively.

However, the ONS publishes information on the number of vacancies from the Vacancy Survey. These headline accredited official statistics are published monthly on a rolling three-monthly basis at UK-level, by industry sector, and by size of business, as part of the ONS's Vacancies and jobs in the UK release.

Further insights into labour demand are provided in the ONS's Labour demand volumes by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2020), UK dataset, which includes official statistics in development sourced from Textkernel data. These tables are published monthly and contain the number of online job adverts split by local authority and occupation (SOC 2020).

Be advised the ONS caution use of these alternative data sources because the data is not seasonally adjusted or directly comparable to their headline estimates.