Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of full-time staff on full pay (1.0 FTE) in the department work compressed hours over a four day week.

The Department is required by law to consider flexible working requests. Compressed hours is a form of flexible working which refers to any type of working arrangement that gives some degree of flexibility around how long, where or when an individual works.

Compressed hours working arrangements can be requested either informally, where the proposed arrangement is ad-hoc and if implemented, would have no impact on an employee's pay or other terms and conditions, or as a formal request.

Requests are agreed between the line manager and employee, subject to business need and predominantly managed locally, so we do not hold a central record of all the arrangements that exist.

As a result, there would be disproportionate cost involved in collating information on all informal and formal compressed hours arrangements as the information would need to be collated in each business area from each line manager.