Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, 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.

We are unable to provide information on the overall number of statutory applications that have been made to request flexible working, as the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) only records requests which have been approved. The table below sets out the number of approved requests as at the end of March 2013 and 2014. The figures for 2013 do not include the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) as they joined the MoJ in April 2013.

The MoJ’s Flexible Working policy goes beyond the statutory duty as employees are able to make a request for flexible working regardless of their length of service. The policy sets out the business reasons that can be given for refusing an application, and the process for informing the requester of the decision. The policy allows for a range of working patterns including job share, reduced or compressed hours, part year working and partial retirement.

There is a separate policy for staff working within the executive agency; National Offender Management Service (NOMS). The NOMS policy allows for temporary, short term agreements to change an employee’s pattern or hours of working, to help staff balance their work and home life effectively. The NOMS policy also allows permanent changes to their pattern or hours of working, which represents a change to general terms and conditions of employment.