Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, how many and what proportion of digital posts in his Department were vacant on 26 February 2024.

As at 31 January 2024, approximately 11.2% of Digital roles were vacant across the Cabinet Office and were either in an active or planned recruitment stage, showing we are making good progress towards reaching the 10% target by 2025 set by the 2022 to 2025 roadmap for digital and data. The majority of these roles sit within Cabinet Office Digital, Government Digital Service and Central Digital and Data Office.

We set this target to drive modernisation and digitisation in Government, improving public services for the British people and saving taxpayer money. Overall good progress has been made, with total vacancies across the Civil Service now at 15%.

In order to improve recruitment success and fill existing vacancies CDDO has:

• recently launched its Government Digital and Data Civil Service Careers (https://www.civil-service-careers.gov.uk/professions/working-in-digital-data-and-technology/) webpage to attract new talent to the Civil Service. The webpage showcases secondment opportunities, talent programmes and digital and data jobs available in departments.

• developed a digital and data pay framework that enables departments to pay more competitive market rates to attract specialist digital and data skills. Participating departments can fund higher civil service pay allowances from savings flowing from reducing their contingent labour headcount.