Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many and what proportion of (a) women and (b) men have made a statutory application to request flexible working in his Department; and how many of those applications have been granted to date.

The Ministry of Defence recognises that it is more likely to attract and retain high calibre staff if it allows its civilian employees to create a good work-life balance. The Department therefore strongly encourages managers to meet requests for non standard working patterns from all civilian staff wherever business requirements allow. Many such requests are agreed at a local level on a non-statutory basis. The Department holds information on those statutory requests for flexible working which have been approved from 1 September 2011. Since that date, some 125 women and 30 men have had their statutory requests approved. However, information on applications which have been rejected is not held centrally. It is therefore not possible to state the total number of statutory applications made.