Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West)
Question to the Northern Ireland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, what guidance her Department provides to its managers on how many days training should be made available to staff.
Answered by Theresa Villiers
My Department provides guidance to our managers and their staff on the Civil Service commitment to provide 5 days development a year.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West)
Question to the Northern Ireland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, how much her Department spent on training in each of the last three financial years.
Answered by Theresa Villiers
My Department’s expenditure on training in each of the last three financial years is shown below:
Financial Year | Expenditure (£) |
2012/13 | 19,912 |
2013/14 | 31,234 |
2014/15 to 31 January 2015 Known committed expenditure for remainder of financial year
Total | 18,050
7,960
26,010 |
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West)
Question to the Northern Ireland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, what her Department's training budget was in each of the last three financial years.
Answered by Theresa Villiers
My Department’s training budget in each of the last three financial years is shown below:
Year | Budget (£) |
2012/13 | 32,000 |
2013/14 | 40,000 |
2014/15 | 40,000 |
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West)
Question to the Northern Ireland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, what the average number of days training of full-time equivalent staff employed in her Department was in each of the last three financial years.
Answered by Theresa Villiers
The number of average training days of full-time equivalent staff employed in my Department is not held in this format. This is because training takes place in many informal formats such as work-shadowing, on the job training and research etc, which are not formally recorded.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West)
Question to the Northern Ireland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, what estimate she has made of the savings to her Department from the Q&A system in the (a) 12 months and (b) five years since 4 June 2014; what additional ICT systems or improvements to existing systems her Department has introduced or plans to introduce that would not have been feasible without the Q&A system; and what assessment she has made of the extent to which the system has made it easier to answer questions from hon. Members on time.
Answered by Theresa Villiers
The electronic Q&A system has removed the requirement to subscribe to the TSO feed for Parliamentary Questions (PQs) resulting in a saving to the Department of £6,504.40 per year.
The reduced paper costs, although relatively small, are also welcome both in environmental and financial terms.
The Northern Ireland Office has not had to introduce, plan to introduce or improve any existing ICT systems.
The Q&A system has allowed the department to answer PQs later in the day than the previous paper-based system, mitigating against the small number of cases where answering close to the deadline was unavoidable. It also allows hon and Rt hon Members to receive their answers instantly once uploaded, and on the electronic platform of their choosing.
One of the benefits of the new system is the possibility for the reporting of the timeliness of answers to Parliamentary Questions to be delivered with greater consistency and accuracy across all answering bodies.
It will be for the Procedure Committee to evaluate the effectiveness of the new system in improving performance when it assesses the evidence following the end of the session.