Asked by: John Pugh (Liberal Democrat - Southport)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, approximately how many (a) British and (b) non-British nationals are employed cleaning the Westminster estate of her Department.
Answered by George Eustice
This information is not held. The cleaners for Defra’s Westminster estate are provided by Interserve (Facilities Management) Ltd. The contract with the supplier requires them to follow all the appropriate checks when employing non British nationals, but the supplier has advised that they do not keep internal statistics about employees being British or non-British.
Asked by: John Pugh (Liberal Democrat - Southport)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what proportion of staff on the payroll of her Department who work in Westminster are (a) British nationals and (b) nationals of another country.
Answered by George Eustice
All Government Departments are bound by legal requirements concerning the right to work in the UK and, in addition, the Civil Service Nationality Rules. Evidence of nationality is checked at the point of recruitment into the Civil Service as part of wider pre-employment checks, but there is no requirement on departments to retain this information beyond the point at which it has served its purpose.
More broadly, the Government will be consulting in due course on how we work with business to ensure that workers in this country have the skills that they need to get a job. But there are no proposals to publish lists of the number or proportion of foreign workers.
Asked by: John Pugh (Liberal Democrat - Southport)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps the Government is taking to mitigate the effect of recent changes in EU policy on the sugar industry.
Answered by George Eustice
The sugar regime is one of the most heavily regulated and distorting elements of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The agreement, as part of the 2013 reforms, to end sugar beet quotas in 2017 is an important step towards removing these distortions.
During negotiations of the reforms the UK Government argued for a fair and balanced outcome for all parts of the sugar industry. Disappointingly, there was insufficient support from other Member States to secure the necessary changes on imports to allow the cane sector to compete on a level playing field with the beet sector. However, we remain committed to working with the European Commission to address this issue through forthcoming EU trade agreements.