Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the additional staff required by his Department in the event that the UK leaves the EU (a) with and (b) without a deal.

It was reported at Home Affairs Select Committee on 13^th November that approximately 4,100 posts would be needed for EU Exit. These are being sourced through a combination of recruitment and internal redeployment.

In general it does not make sense to draw a hard distinction between what is needed for ‘deal’ compared with ‘no deal’ as much of the capacity requirement is similar. Moreover we would expect to meet most of our additional requirements for ‘no deal’ through redeployment – reprioritising staff away from other activities. There is a specific requirement for additional no deal resourcing in HM Passport Office of around 330 full-time equivalent which we are expecting to meet through temporary staff.