Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many times his Department has used the services of (a) PwC, (b) Deloitte, (c) Ernst and Young, (d) KPMG and (e) other consulting firms in the last three financial years; and what (i) work was undertaken and (ii) the cost to the public purse was on each such occasion.

We are unable to provide the requested information on the number of times the Department for Work and Pensions has used the services of consulting firms, including details of the work undertaken and cost to the public purse for each occasion. To do so would incur a disproportional cost to the Department because of how the data is held on our systems, and the time and resource required for extracting and analysing it.