Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many staff in his Department have formal arrangements to work from home during the covid-19 outbreak.

In line with the wider Civil Service and as a result of Government guidance on social distancing measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, the majority of staff working for the Department are currently working at home. These are temporary measures and are either in line with their normal working pattern or adapted to reflect caring and other responsibilities, along with business needs. Working from home is not recorded on our HR systems, although from our current business knowledge and levels of remote systems access we estimate that over 90% of our staff are currently working from home.

As part of our existing approach to working flexibly, Departmental staff have access to laptops and IT to enable them to work remotely. We have also supplemented the existing guidance with additional staff toolkits in the context of COVID-19 about working from home, managing teams remotely and wellbeing and are also deploying a programme of remotely delivered staff communication and engagement activities.