Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, which (a) external data analysts and (b) data collection companies his Department has used in each of the last five years.

All Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) requests to use external contractor staff must be approved by the Chief Operating Officer during the on-going Civil Service-wide recruitment freeze. Our records show that only one request has been submitted to specifically bring in an external data analyst for a time-limited period over the last five years. This individual was recruited via the FCO’s managed service provider, Hays Recruitment. The FCO does not centrally hold data on the use of data collection companies. To provide this information would incur disproportionate cost.

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