Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, how many and what proportion of (a) women and (b) men have made a statutory application to request flexible working in the Law Officers' Departments; and how many of those applications have been granted to date.

Permanent staff in the Law Officers’ Departments have been entitled to apply for flexible working for a number of years. However, complete records of the number of employees who may have applied for flexible working are not maintained. The information that is available is detailed below.

The Treasury Solicitor’s Department (TSol) only keeps records of flexible working patterns that impact directly on pay and annual leave, and no separate record is held of applications made under a statutory right. The current position, as at 31/10/2014, in respect of compressed hours and part-time working is detailed in the table below.

*percentage of total male / **percentage of total female

Note: TSol data also includes the Attorney General’s Office and Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate.

The following table contains details on the applications made to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for flexible working between 23/06/2008 and 06/10/2014.

Note: The source data has been extracted from the CPS Pay and Benefits working database on 20/11/2014. The CPS does not capture data for statutory applications separately or any applications that may have been refused and not forwarded to the CPS National Pay and Benefits Team.

The Serious Fraud Office does not retain any central record of applications to work flexibly. However, currently 19.6% of men and 26% of women have some form of flexible working arrangement.