Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, pursuant to the Answer of 13 July 2026 to Question 16636, on DfT: Public Relations, what assessment her Department has made of the adequacy of her department's communications staff's PR skills to deliver such PR campaigns.

The communications department has a range of communications skills in house, including but not limited to public relations. The department accesses specialist support through agency contracts not necessarily because of a skills gap, but because doing so can provide wider benefits such as the ability to negotiate third party costs due to a broader range of clients and combined budgets managed by the agency and access to surge resource over busy campaign periods or for specific projects where permanent resource would not be appropriate or cost-effective.