Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what proportion of women are employed by his Department on non-London pay structures in the following pay grades (a) Administrative Assistant, (b) Administrative Officer, (c) Executive Officer, (d) Higher Executive Officer, (e) Fast Streamer, (f) Senior Executive Officer, (g) Grade Seven, (h) Grade Six, (i) Senior Civil Service Band 1, (j) Senior Civil Service Band 1A, (k) Senior Civil Service Band 2 and (l) Senior Civil Service Band 3.

The proportion of women employed by my Department on an outer London pay structure, by pay grade, is as follows:

Admin Assistant/Officer: 0.3%

Executive Officer: 0.5%

Higher/Senior Executive Officer: 3.1%

Grade Six/Seven: 2.1%

The Cabinet Office is headquartered in London and therefore these figures will reflect that.

The Government is committed to improving female representation and tackling the gender pay gap in the Civil Service. As part of the Talent Action Plan the commitments we will take forward include a critical talent review and to review our approach to maternity leave and returning to work. We have already introduced shared parental leave across the Civil Service and a new online job share portal to help people identify job share opportunities across the organisation.

From April 2017 we will be introducing new measures that require all organisations across the private, voluntary and public sector to regularly publish gender pay gap analysis and statistics, to bring greater transparency to pay disparities between men and women across the UK.

There is no central policy on moving civil servants between London and the regions. Departments determine their own workforce requirements and the Civil Service has significant UK-wide presence. Workforce planning is primarily the responsibility of each department to determine based on their individual operational and policy requirements.