Home Office: Brexit

(asked on 20th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many officials in his Department have been seconded away from their normal duties to work on the UK's withdrawal from the EU; and what effect that secondment of staff has had on the effectiveness of his Department.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 7th June 2019

The department has been continually assessing the resourcing levels required to prepare for EU Exit across all possible scenarios, developing contingency plans in line with government policy. It is not possible to provide the number of staff who have been moved from normal duties. This is because staff are generally engaged across a range of workstreams, which will include business as usual activity as well as EU Exit preparations, across all scenarios.

To release existing capacity on to specialist roles to support the UK’s exit from the EU in an orderly manner, the Home Office took a number of reprioritisation choices in early 2019 to release capacity on to critical EU Exit roles. This was undertaken as part of a cross-government reprioritisation exercise.

As a general principle, reprioritisation decisions within the Home Office focussed on areas of its domestic work which could be scaled back or slowed, thus alleviating the need to halt these areas of work in their entirety whilst fulfilling the need to release the required numbers of specialist resource on to critical EU Exit roles.

To minimise the overall demand for internal reprioritisation, the Home Office also sought to secure resource through the Cabinet Office clearing hub, a government-wide initiative set up to meet the demands of EU Exit through cross-departmental redeployment of resource across policy and operational delivery roles.

Reticulating Splines