Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what professional development courses are made available to staff of his Department; and what the cost to the public purse is of each such course.

The Department provides a range of development courses for all staff via Civil Service Learning, the recognised supplier for all training. The options predominantly fall under the main categories of Core Skills, Leadership and Management, Working in the Civil Service and Talent, as well as a range of training across a number of professions e.g. statisticians, Human Resources etc.

Full details of all training activities and exercises engaged in by staff are not held centrally. Some activities are arranged individually or locally. For us to contact each member of the Department's local business teams to obtain such information would entail contacting a large number of staff and asking them to search for and retrieve such data. Therefore, while the Department does hold some information relevant to the hon. Member's request, extracting the totality of this data would require a significant amount of manual searching which would incur disproportionate costs.