Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, pursuant to the Answer of 12 September 2017 to Question 7591, on civil servants: recruitment, whether any workers or firms from outside the Government have been involved in any of the work surrounding the pilots.

The Civil Service Workforce Plan 2016-2020 includes an action to pilot alternative to competency-based recruitment and promotion in the Civil Service. A number of departments are involved in piloting alternative approaches. In a small number of cases, external consultants have provided support for these alternative approaches, for example in developing specific assessment tests for use across the Civil Service. These have included IBM who were contracted to develop Verbal and Numerical reasoning tests; and CS judgement tests which were procured through Right Management (subcontracted to A&DC) with payments also made to WCN, providers of the CS Jobs site. The Digital Accessibility Centre was also commissioned to carry out an accessibility audit.