Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the corrected Answer of 22 January 2019 to Question 206251, how many civil servants in his Department were working part or full-time on projects in the Government Major Projects Portfolio in (a) June 2016 and (b) December 2018.

The GMPP is a continually evolving portfolio of the government’s most complex and high risk projects. Direct comparisons of the GMPP across years should therefore be treated with caution. Projects join and leave the GMPP throughout the year and it is therefore likely that a simple comparison across two time points will refer to different sets of projects.

At the end of June 2016 (i.e. the end of the Quarter 1 reporting period for 2016-17), 58.8 officials in DCMS were working on GMPP projects.

GMPP data for December 2018 (Q3 2018/19) has not yet been cleared and finalised. At the end of September 2018 (i.e. the latest submitted data, at end of the Quarter 2 reporting period for 2018-19), 127.5 officials in DCMS were working on GMPP projects.

This data refers to public sector employees, defined as those who are directly in the employment of the Civil or Crown Service, local government or Arms’ Length Body at the relevant snapshot date, including seconded members of staff who join the team as Civil, Crown or Public servants.