Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 5 December 2014 to Question 216273, on HM Passport Offices, what estimate she has made of the average cost to her Department of (a) redundancy payments and (b) recruitment costs, of re-hiring a former employee.

In 2012/13 and 2013/14, 20 members of staff in Her Majesty’s Passport Office were made compulsorily redundant at a total cost of £429,000. The average cost of these redundancies was £ 21,450.

Recruitment costs are not, however, held centrally and provision of this information could therefore only be provided at disproportionate cost.